Matthew 5:43-48 — Love Your Enemies

FRANK: "Hate." That's the word I want to start on today, because Jesus quotes a command that has that word in it, and here's the strange part... it isn't in the Bible. Did Jesus get it wrong?

LINDA: Jesus quotes Scripture and gets it wrong?

FRANK: Not wrong. He quotes what everybody had heard. "You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy." The first half is Leviticus. The second half, that little tail, "hate your enemy"... God never wrote it. Somebody added it. And I think when you see where it came from, this whole passage cracks open. Want to chase that before we do the welcome?

LINDA: The welcome first, because I know somebody just hit play.

FRANK: [laughs] Fair. Welcome to Dig Deeper, glad you're here with us this afternoon. We are in the Sermon on the Mount today, Matthew chapter five, verses forty-three through forty-eight. The last of the big "you have heard it said, but I tell you" statements, and honestly one of the hardest things Jesus ever asked of anyone.

LINDA: Love your enemies. Yeah. That's the one everybody quotes and nobody wants.

FRANK: Let me read it through, and then we'll get into it. Matthew five, forty-three.

FRANK: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don't even the tax collectors do the same? If you only greet your friends, what more do you do than others? Don't even the tax collectors do the same? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."

LINDA: The footnote. Come back to that. You said "hate your enemy" got grafted on. How does that even happen? Somebody just... adds a line to the Bible and nobody stops them?

FRANK: It's subtler than that, and it's honestly the more human version. Nobody stands up and says "let's edit Moses." What happens is the real command gets slowly bent by how you read one word. Leviticus nineteen, verse eighteen, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Real Scripture, straight from God. But look at the front half of that same verse, the part people forget. It starts, "you shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people." Against the children of your people. So over generations the teaching drifts. "Neighbor" starts to mean "your people." Your covenant community. Fellow Israelites.

LINDA: Once neighbor only means "us," the shadow writes itself.

FRANK: Then there's an outside. And if love only reaches as far as your own kind, the shadow writes itself. Everyone outside the fence? Fair game. There was a community out by the Dead Sea, the people who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they taught it flat out. Love all the sons of light. Hate all the sons of darkness. That wasn't a slip. That was doctrine. Somebody sat down and taught it on purpose.

LINDA: The hatred wasn't people being sloppy. It was a whole worked-out theology, and it grew out of shrinking one word. "Neighbor" got small.

FRANK: Shrinking one word—that's the move exactly. It matters because Jesus isn't inventing something new here. Watch what he does. He doesn't say "Moses was wrong." He strips the footnote off and pushes the original further than anyone had the nerve to. Out past the neighbor. To the enemy itself. He's not correcting Moses. He's recovering him. There's a thing buried in that same chapter of Leviticus, by the way. Nineteen, verse two. "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy." That's the taproot of this whole passage. The character of God is the standard for his people. That was ancient. What does "be holy" mean to you?

LINDA: I picture the opposite of this. I picture separation. Don't touch that, don't eat that, stay clean, stay apart. That's the enemy of loving your enemy, isn't it?

FRANK: That's the surface reading, and it's exactly the one Jesus refuses. He takes "be holy" and he does not point you toward the wall you build to keep the world out. He points you at the weather. "He makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, sends rain on the just and the unjust." That's his proof. You want to know what God's holiness looks like? Look up. The sun doesn't audit a man before it warms his face. The rain doesn't check whose field it's falling on. Holiness, it turns out, has always looked like mercy that doesn't discriminate.

LINDA: The sun on the evil and the good. I want to slow down there, because that's the picture that actually gets me. He could've argued this a hundred ways and he goes to the sky. What's the theology there?

FRANK: And there's a doctrine in it. Theologians call it common grace. The good that God pours out on everybody, believer and unbeliever, deserving and not. Every sunrise over a city full of people who don't give him a second thought, that's a gift he owes no one. Think about what Jesus is really saying. The command isn't arbitrary. He's not handing you a rule off a list. He says love your enemies "that you may be children of your Father." Children resemble the father. That's the core of it. You do it because it's what he's like. And here's the part that undoes me. The love he's asking you to show your enemy is the love he already showed his. A world that spat at his prophets, that would nail his own Son to a cross, and every morning he still throws the sun over it.

LINDA: This isn't Jesus asking me to do something God wouldn't do himself.

FRANK: It's the opposite. Paul says it plainly in Romans five. "God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Read that word "sinners" as "enemies," because that's what it means there. We weren't neutral. We were the sons of darkness. And he did not send lightning. He sent his Son. So when you look for the enemy God is asking you to love... you find out you were one.

LINDA: [sighs] That reframes the whole command. I keep hearing "love your enemies" as this heroic, gritted-teeth thing I have to summon up. And you're saying I'm not the hero of it at all. I'm the enemy who got loved first.

FRANK: You were among them. That's the good news hiding inside the hardest command in the sermon. Now, can I show you the meanest thing Jesus does in these verses? Because he twists the knife on purpose.

LINDA: The tax collector line. He says it twice.

FRANK: He says it twice. "If you love those who love you, what reward is that? Don't even the tax collectors do the same?" And you have to feel what that name did to a first-century crowd. We hear "tax collector" and think, I don't know, the guy at the IRS. Annoying. Not evil. That is not what they heard.

FRANK: Rome didn't send its own men to work every tollbooth. It auctioned the job. A local man would buy the right to collect, pay Rome up front, and then squeeze his own neighbors to make his money back and then some. So a Jewish tax collector was a man who bought a franchise from the empire occupying his country and turned it on his own people. He handled Gentile coins with Caesar's face stamped on them. The rabbis lumped him in with thieves. His word wasn't accepted in court. A devout family wouldn't share a meal with him. He was the traitor in the village wearing a familiar face.

LINDA: That's who Jesus picks.

FRANK: Jesus picks him as the floor. The low bar. He says, you love the people who love you back? You greet your friends? Congratulations. The man at the tollbooth returns a smile to the people who smile at him. Even the collaborator everyone agrees has sunk beneath decency does that much. That's not the mark of a child of God. That's the reflex of the most despised man you know.

LINDA: Ooh. That's a gut punch. Because I would've told you I'm a pretty loving person, and what he's saying is, the love I'm proud of is the love a traitor also has. It costs nothing.

FRANK: Nothing. It's just affection bouncing back off the people who already give it to you. God's rain falls wider than that. And so must yours. There's real wonder in it, honestly, that Jesus tucked the entire logic of grace inside an insult everybody in that crowd would've felt in their stomach.

LINDA: So we're at the last verse, and this is the one that has scared people for two thousand years. "Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." I mean, come on. Nobody's perfect. That sounds like the door slamming shut. You've spent this whole time telling me this is good news and then it ends on "be flawless or else."

FRANK: And this is where the English fails us badly. The word is teleios. And teleios does not mean flawless. It does not mean you get a hundred percent on the moral exam with no mistakes. Teleios describes a thing that has arrived at what it was made to be. A fruit is teleios when it's ripe. A plan is teleios when it's brought to completion at the finish. It's about completion. Reaching the end you were designed for.

LINDA: Wait. So it's not "be perfect" like spotless. It's more like... "be finished." Be fully grown.

FRANK: Be fully grown. That's it. And now hear the command again through that. Love that stops at your friend, that stops at your neighbor... that's love arrested halfway. It's love that never grew up. Love that reaches the enemy is love come to its full stature. Love that finally looks like the Father's. So Jesus isn't hanging an impossible weight over your head and walking off. He's telling you what you were made for. That word in front of it, "therefore," ties it to everything he just said. Because God's love reaches the enemy, and you're his child, therefore this is your ripeness. This is you, finished.

LINDA: That opens up something I wasn't expecting. Because "be finished" still sounds like a demand until you ask who's doing the finishing. And I don't think it's me. On my own I can't manufacture warm feelings for someone who hurt me.

FRANK: And Jesus never asks you to. Notice where the completeness actually lands in the New Testament. It lands in Christ. Paul uses this same word for the whole church's destiny, growing up "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Christ is the only one who ever loved his enemies to the bitter end. On the cross, with the nails going in, he prayed for the men driving them. "Father, forgive them." What Matthew five forty-eight commands, Jesus was. And what he was, he's now making of you. It's not a bar you clear by straining. It's a work he started and doesn't abandon.

LINDA: Okay. So let me bring this down to the driveway, because it's easy to love an enemy in the abstract. There's a specific person, though, isn't there. Not the neighbor with the loud dog. Somebody I've actually decided I'm done with.

FRANK: That's the one this passage won't let you keep off to the side. Not just the annoying neighbor. The family member. The ex-friend. The coworker who wronged you badly enough that you quietly stopped hoping for anything good in their direction. "Bless those who curse you" doesn't leave a category for a person you've written off.

LINDA: And I'll be honest about what makes it hard, and it's not what I'd have guessed. It's not the anger. The anger cooled a while ago. It's that I like occupying that space of being wronged. There's this little private satisfaction in it. I get to stay cold, and I'm in the right, and I earned that.

FRANK: That's the exact cost. Surrendering the small satisfaction of being the injured party. And here's where it actually finds you. Their name comes up at a dinner. Or a message from them lands in your inbox. Or a mutual friend mentions, oh, they're doing really well lately. And you feel that old flatness settle in your chest.

LINDA: Yeah. I know that flatness.

FRANK: That's the moment. And obedience there is not a warm feeling you have to work up. It's a decision, small and enormous at the same time. You say, out loud even, "I hope things go well for them, and I mean it." You send the reply without the edge you'd already drafted in your head. When their name comes up, you leave out the one cutting little detail you were going to add. And you cannot grind that out of willpower, so don't try. The Spirit who raised Christ is in you. The God who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good is pouring that same generosity out through your hands.

LINDA: He blessed me while I was still his enemy. So I'm not generating mercy from scratch. I'm spending from an account that's already full.

FRANK: And it never runs dry. That's how it works. You love from a love you received first.

LINDA: Sit on that a while, whoever's listening. Not "who's my enemy in theory." Who's the one name you've written off. Because that's the person Jesus put in this verse.

FRANK: So here's your charge, and I'll keep it in his words, not mine. "Pray for those who mistreat you." That one person. By name. Today, out loud if you can manage it. And don't pray "God, fix them." Pray that God would do them genuine good. Their health, their family, their joy. And just notice what happens to the flatness in your chest while you're saying it.

LINDA: Let it work on you. That's the day.

FRANK: This episode's part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you haven't found it yet, just look for Dig Deeper wherever you get your apps.