Matthew 5:43-48 — Love Your Enemies

FRANK: His. There's one small word in today's passage that most of us read right past, and it's a possessive. Jesus doesn't say the sun comes up on the evil and the good, like that's just... what the sky does. He says the Father causes *his* sun to rise on them. His sun. It belongs to someone, and that someone aims it at people who hate him. Every single morning.

LINDA: A sun that belongs to somebody could be switched off, then. That's what's rattling me already. If it's his, he decides who gets it, and apparently he decides in favor of the people I'd happily leave in the dark.

FRANK: [laughs] Decides is exactly the word. And Jesus says that decision is the pattern we're supposed to copy.

LINDA: A big thing to put in front of anybody before they've even backed out of the driveway. Welcome to Dig Deeper, I'm Linda Brown, across the desk is Frank Edwards, and today we're in Matthew five, verses forty-three through forty-eight... the last of those "you have heard that it was said" sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, and honestly the one with the sharpest edge. Frank's got it open.

FRANK: Matthew five, beginning at verse forty-three. "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor' and 'Hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

LINDA: "Hate your enemy." I would have bet money that line is in Leviticus somewhere. Jesus says "you have heard it said," and I assume he's quoting the Bible.

FRANK: Half of it he is. "Love your neighbor" is Leviticus nineteen, verse eighteen, word for word. "And hate your enemy"... you can search the Law of Moses from one end to the other and you won't find it. God never wrote it. So where did it come from? Look at the sentence it grew out of. Leviticus nineteen eighteen opens, "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people," and then, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Over centuries of teaching, "neighbor" got read as "the children of your people," fellow Israelites, the covenant family, and once love has a border drawn around it, the people on the other side of that border start to look like fair game. By Jesus' day this wasn't a careless misreading, it was doctrine. The community at Qumran, the people who gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, taught members to love all the sons of light and hate all the sons of darkness. Written down. Taught.

FRANK: The irony is that the Law had already gone the other way. Exodus twenty-three: if you come across your enemy's ox wandering off, you walk it back to him. If his donkey collapses under its load, you help him get it on its feet. Your enemy's donkey! The mercy was sitting in Moses all along, under the footnote. So what is Jesus doing when he says "but I tell you"?

LINDA: Recovering Moses, not overruling him... because the hate was never God's sentence in the first place, it was something people bolted on.

FRANK: Recovering him, and then pushing the original command further than anyone had dared. Out past the neighbor, out past the border, to the enemy. And for that crowd, the enemy had a face. Judea was an occupied country. The enemy was the Roman soldier at the checkpoint who could make you haul his pack for a mile, the Samaritan over the ridge, the tax collector skimming for Rome. Jesus isn't talking about somebody mildly irritating. He's talking about the person whose presence reminds you, every day, that you are not free. That person—the one whose face you see and feel the weight of occupation—that's who he means.

LINDA: It's the man on the platform. The coworker who's been quietly building a case to get you pushed out, and you stand twenty feet from him at seven fifty-two every morning waiting for the same train, and neither of you looks up. Is Jesus really saying love him? Not tolerate him, not be professional about it... love him?

FRANK: Love him. And pray for him, the text adds, which is the half people tend to drop. But look at the reason Jesus gives, because it isn't "it'll make you feel better," and it isn't "he might change." It's this: "that you may be sons of your Father in heaven." Children resemble their father. That's the controlling claim of the passage, put plainly: God's own character is the pattern for his children, and his character is a generosity that runs toward people who have earned nothing from him. Theologians call this common grace, the goodness God pours out on everyone, believer and rebel alike, simply by keeping the world going. Rain on the cruel man's field. Sunlight on the face of a man who curses the God who made it. Every sunrise over a city that ignores him is a gift he owes to no one. And Jesus says: that's your Father. Look like him.

LINDA: Weather isn't love, though. The sun comes up on everybody because that's how planets work, not because God looked at my coworker and decided to be kind to him.

FRANK: Planets working is exactly what Jesus won't let us say. "He causes his sun to rise." An active verb, and a personal owner. In the Bible's way of seeing the world, there's no such thing as a sunrise that simply happens; every dawn is God doing something, on purpose, to someone. And Luke's version of this same teaching drops the weather and just says it outright: God "is kind toward the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful." Kind. To the unthankful. The sun is the picture... the kindness is the point.

LINDA: God isn't standing on that platform. He doesn't lose anything by sending rain on bad people. If I start blessing the guy who's trying to get me fired, I lose something real.

FRANK: What did it cost the Father? Romans five, verse eight: "God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." The Father doesn't just warm his enemies' faces. He sent his Son to die for them. So enemy-love was never cheap sentiment for God, and it isn't meant to be cheap for us. Paul makes it concrete in Romans twelve: "if your enemy is hungry, feed him," and "overcome evil with good." Active. Costly. Aimed straight at your attacker. And Stephen, with the stones already falling on him, cries out, "Lord, don't hold this sin against them." Nobody reading Acts seven thinks Stephen is a doormat. He's the freest man in that scene.

LINDA: [short pause] What it costs me is the grievance. On that platform I'm the wronged one, and being the wronged one is... comfortable. It gives me somewhere to stand. Blessing him means standing there with nothing under my feet except whatever God gives me.

FRANK: And underneath that sits the tax collector, because Jesus goes after that comfortable posture from a completely different angle. Rome didn't send its own clerks to collect every toll. It auctioned the right. A local man paid Rome up front, then squeezed his own people at the roads and the harbors to earn it back with a profit on top. He handled Caesar's coins. He bought a franchise from the occupation and turned it on his neighbors. The rabbis lumped tax collectors in with robbers, their testimony wasn't accepted in court, and a devout family wouldn't share a meal with one. He was the floor, and everybody agreed on that. And Jesus says, you love the people who love you back? Congratulations. So does he.

LINDA: The toll plaza, then, if the man in the booth had bought it from an occupying army and was pocketing extra on every car. And my niceness on a good commute, letting someone merge because they waved at me first, is his kind of love.

FRANK: His kind precisely. Reciprocity. "If you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others?" The Greek there is perisson, literally "what surplus," what's left over after the exchange is settled? Love that only returns what it's been handed has no surplus in it. It's a trade. And then comes the word that gathers everything up: "therefore." "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

LINDA: Perfect. That's the word where people close the book. Nobody listening to this is perfect, and Jesus knows it.

FRANK: The word is teleios, and our English "perfect" pushes us toward the wrong picture... a spotless record, a score of a hundred, no marks against you. Teleios is about arriving. It describes something that has reached the end it was made for. A fig is teleios when it's ripe. A plan is teleios when it's been seen through to its finish. So when Jesus says be teleios as your Father is teleios, he isn't holding up a ledger. He's telling you what your love was made to grow into. Love that stops at the friend and the neighbor is love stuck halfway, fruit that never ripened. Love that reaches the enemy is love grown to its full size, the Father's size. Leviticus nineteen had already said it, "You shall be holy, for I am holy," and Luke's word here is "merciful." Holiness, it turns out, has always looked like mercy.

LINDA: Translation trick, if you ask me. We trade "perfect" for "complete," and suddenly an impossible command sounds manageable. I'm suspicious of any Greek word that makes Jesus easier.

FRANK: It doesn't make him easier. It makes him harder. Flawless, you can fake... draw up a list of rules, keep most of them, feel decent about yourself. But whole? Whole means no gaps. No person you've quietly written off, no category of human being your love gets to skip. The man on the platform isn't an exception to the command, he's the test of whether your love has ripened at all. A ledger can be gamed. A fig is either ripe or it isn't.

LINDA: Then you've made it worse. If it's harder than flawless, it's still impossible, and now I can't even hide behind rule-keeping.

FRANK: Worse, yes, if it's a bar you have to clear by yourself. But is it? Paul uses this same word for where the church is headed. Ephesians four: "to a fully grown man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Colossians one: "that we may present every man perfect in Christ." In Christ. There is exactly one person who ever loved his enemies to the very end, and he did it on a cross, praying for the men with the hammers, "Father, forgive them." What Matthew five forty-eight commands, Jesus was. And the ripening he finished in himself is the ripening he's working in you now. You were one of the enemies that sun came up on. He sent no lightning. He sent his Son.

LINDA: Some of that I believe. I believe he's doing it, I believe the ripening is real. What I don't believe yet is that I'm going to want to, at seven fifty-two, with the train running late and him standing right there.

FRANK: You may not want to. And I don't think this one ties off neatly, because the command is still bigger than both of us, and a sermon doesn't ripen anybody. The text doesn't ask you to manufacture a feeling first. It asks for a prayer, "pray for those who persecute you," which a person can pray through clenched teeth, for a man who may never know it was prayed. [quietly] The sun will come up over that platform at the same hour it always does, low and bright, and it will hit his face the same as yours. The Father's sun. Whether your love is ripe by then, I can't promise you. But the one asking is already doing it, in the sky above you both.

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