"Love Your Enemies" — The Most Unreasonable Command Ever Given
Jesus told you to love the person who hurt you the most. Not tolerate. Not avoid. Love. And He said it while staring down a cross meant for the very people He was commanding you to love. This isn't a greeting card. It's a grenade thrown into how humans naturally work.
The Command That Makes Everyone Uncomfortable
Some things Jesus said are hard to understand. This one is hard to want to understand.
“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.…”
Love your enemies.
Not “put up with your enemies.” Not “avoid your enemies.” Not “wait until your enemies apologize and then, if they seem sincere enough, consider maybe starting to feel slightly less hostile toward them.”
Love them. And while you’re at it — pray for them.
This is Jesus at His most disruptive. Because this isn’t a hard theological concept that requires a seminary degree to unpack. It’s a simple sentence a child could understand. The words aren’t complicated.
It’s the doing that’s impossible.
Or at least, it feels impossible — until you realize what Jesus is actually asking, and why, and what it does to you when you start.
The World That Heard This First
We read “love your enemies” and think about that coworker who threw us under the bus. The ex who lied. The family member who said that thing at Thanksgiving.
The people sitting on that hillside in Galilee? They were thinking about Roman soldiers.
These weren’t metaphorical enemies. Roman occupation meant soldiers could legally force you to carry their gear for a mile (that’s the context for “go the extra mile” in Matthew 5:41). It meant crippling taxation. Public crucifixions as a warning. Random violence with zero accountability.
Jesus was speaking to an oppressed people under a brutal empire, and He looked them in the eye and said: Love them. Pray for them.
You can imagine the silence.
This wasn’t a comfortable spiritual principle for people living comfortable lives. This was a rabbi telling suffering people to love the ones causing their suffering. And He didn’t even flinch saying it — because He knew He was about to do it Himself.
What “Love” Actually Means Here
Here’s where most people misunderstand this command, and the misunderstanding is what makes it feel so impossible.
When Jesus says “love your enemies,” we hear it through our modern filter where love is primarily a feeling. An emotion. An affection. And the immediate objection is: How can I feel warm and fuzzy about someone who destroyed me?
But the Greek word here — agapaō — isn’t about feelings. It’s about action.
Agape love is a decision. It’s choosing someone’s good regardless of whether they deserve it. It’s treating them as a person bearing the image of God even when they’ve treated you as less than human. It’s a commitment to their well-being that has nothing to do with their behavior toward you.
This distinction changes everything.
Jesus is not commanding you to feel a certain way. He’s commanding you to act a certain way. He’s not asking you to pretend the hurt didn’t happen. He’s asking you to respond to the hurt in a way that looks nothing like what the hurt “deserves.”
There’s a massive difference between:
- “Feel affection for the person who abused you” (Jesus never said this)
- “Choose to treat them with dignity, refuse to seek revenge, and genuinely desire their redemption” (Jesus absolutely said this)
One is emotional gaslighting. The other is supernatural courage.
The Reason Behind the Command
Jesus doesn’t just drop this bomb and walk away. He explains why:
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.
Read that carefully. Jesus isn’t saying you become God’s child by loving your enemies. He’s saying that when you love your enemies, you look like your Father. You display the family resemblance.
Because God doesn’t only bless the people who love Him back.
Every sunrise that an atheist enjoys? That’s God loving His enemy. Every rainstorm that waters the crops of someone who curses His name? That’s grace without a return policy. Every breath drawn by every person who has ever shaken their fist at heaven? That’s God choosing, again and again, to sustain the lives of people who reject Him.
This is how God operates. This is the family business.
And then Jesus drives the point home with a question that should make us squirm:
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?
In other words: loving people who love you back isn’t love. It’s a transaction. It’s reciprocity. It’s how every civilization in history has operated. Dogs do it. Mafia families do it. There’s nothing divine about it.
The thing that marks you as God’s — the thing that makes people stop and wonder if maybe something supernatural is going on — is when you love the people who don’t love you back.
The Part Everyone Skips
Right after “love your enemies,” Jesus says something most people speed-read past:
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,
Not pray about them. Not pray against them. Pray for them.
This is where the command goes from difficult to devastating. Because you can grit your teeth and act lovingly toward someone while still harboring a quiet hope that God will make their life miserable. You can white-knuckle your way through “being the bigger person” while your internal monologue runs a highlight reel of everything they did wrong.
But you cannot pray sincerely for someone’s good and keep hating them at the same time.
Try it. Pray — really pray — for someone who hurt you. Not the sanitized “Lord, deal with them” prayer. An actual, specific, for-their-good prayer. “God, bless their family. Give them peace. Help them know you. Bring good things into their life.”
Something happens when you do that. Something breaks inside the machinery of bitterness. Because prayer repositions you. It puts you and your enemy in the same place — at the feet of the same God, equally dependent on the same grace.
Corrie ten Boom survived the Holocaust. After the war, she traveled speaking about forgiveness. One night, a former guard from Ravensbrück concentration camp — the camp where her sister Berta died — approached her after a speech. He extended his hand and asked for her forgiveness.
She wrote: “I stood there — I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven — and could not forgive. It could not have been many seconds that he stood there — hand held out — but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.”
She prayed. She reached out her hand. And she wrote that she felt a current flow from her shoulder down her arm, a love for that man that overwhelmed her. “I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”
That’s what happens on the other side of this command. Not before it. On the other side.
”But You Don’t Know What They Did to Me”
You’re right. I don’t.
And Jesus isn’t minimizing it. Nowhere in this passage does He say, “Love your enemies because what they did wasn’t that bad.” He calls them enemies. He uses the word persecute. He’s not talking about people who mildly inconvenienced you. He’s talking about people who set out to harm you.
The Bible doesn’t sanitize pain:
- David wrote psalms crying out for justice against people trying to kill him (Psalm 55:12-14 — betrayed by his close friend)
- Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and spent years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit (Genesis 37-41)
- Jeremiah was beaten, imprisoned, and thrown into a muddy cistern for telling the truth (Jeremiah 38:6)
- Stephen was stoned to death while praying for his killers (Acts 7:59-60)
God acknowledges the weight of what was done to you. He doesn’t ask you to pretend it didn’t matter.
But here’s the tension: holding onto hatred doesn’t punish your enemy. It punishes you.
Bitterness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. It’s a prison where you’re both the inmate and the warden, and you keep choosing not to use the key.
Loving your enemy isn’t about letting them off the hook. It’s about taking yourself off the hook.
What This Doesn’t Mean
Let’s be clear about what Jesus is not saying, because bad theology around this command has caused real damage:
1. It doesn’t mean staying in an abusive situation. Love sometimes looks like firm boundaries. Jesus loved the Pharisees — and He flipped tables and called them whitewashed tombs (Matthew 23:27). Love and proximity are not the same thing.
2. It doesn’t mean there’s no justice. Paul writes in Romans 12:19: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath.” You’re not being asked to become the person’s judge. You’re being asked to step out of the judge’s seat and let God handle it. That’s not weakness. That’s trust.
3. It doesn’t mean trust is automatically restored. Forgiveness is a decision. Trust is earned over time. You can forgive someone completely and still choose not to give them access to your life. Joseph forgave his brothers — but he also tested them extensively before revealing who he was (Genesis 42-44). Forgiveness and reconciliation are related but not identical.
4. It doesn’t mean you can’t grieve. Loving your enemy doesn’t mean you can’t also grieve what they took from you. Lament is all over the Psalms. God gave you permission to be honest about pain. Being honest about the wound and choosing love for the one who caused it — that’s not contradiction. That’s maturity.
The Man Who Lived This Command
Here’s the part that wrecks me every time.
Jesus didn’t just teach this. He performed it — in the most extreme circumstances imaginable.
The night He was betrayed, Judas walked up and kissed Him. And Jesus called him “friend” (Matthew 26:50). Not “traitor.” Not what anyone else would have called a man who was selling them to their death. Friend.
When Peter cut off a soldier’s ear in the garden, Jesus healed the man who had come to arrest Him (Luke 22:51). His last miracle before the cross was an act of kindness toward His enemy.
On the cross — nails in His hands, blood in His eyes, lungs collapsing — He prayed:
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.
The soldiers who hammered the nails. The religious leaders who orchestrated it. The crowd who screamed for it. Judas who sold Him. Peter who denied Him. The disciples who ran.
He prayed for all of them. While dying because of them.
This is why Jesus had the authority to give this command. He wasn’t asking you to do something He wasn’t willing to do first. He lived it. He bled it. He died doing it.
And then He rose — proving that love really does win, even when it looks like it lost.
So How Do You Start?
If you have an enemy right now — and most of us do, even if we don’t use that word — here’s a place to start. Not a formula. A direction.
Step 1: Name them. Not in anger. In honesty. Who is the person you can’t forgive? Whose name makes your stomach clench? Bring that name before God.
Step 2: Pray for them. Not “God, change them.” That’s still about you. Try: “God, bless them. Meet them where they are. Do good things in their life that I can’t do and don’t want to do. Your will for them, not mine.”
Step 3: Release the verdict. You’ve probably replayed the offense a thousand times, refining the case against them. Tell God: “I’m putting the gavel down. This is yours to judge, not mine. I’m done carrying it.”
Step 4: Repeat. This isn’t a one-time event. Forgiveness is a direction, not a destination. Some mornings you’ll wake up and the bitterness will be back like it never left. Pray again. Release again. Choose again. It gets lighter.
Step 5: Watch what happens. Not necessarily to them. To you. Something shifts when you stop carrying the weight of being someone else’s judge. Space opens up inside you — space that was occupied by resentment. And into that space, if you let Him, God moves.
The Impossible Standard
Jesus ends this section of the Sermon on the Mount with a line that stops everyone cold:
Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
Which… we can’t be. Not fully. Not yet.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this command is meant to drive us to our knees. To show us the gap between who we are and who God is. To make us desperate for the very grace we’re being asked to extend.
You can’t love your enemy in your own strength. Not really. Not the deep kind. You need something from outside yourself — the same love that held Jesus on that cross when He had every right to call down angels.
That love is available. It has been since the day He rose.
The question isn’t whether you can love your enemy. In your own power, you can’t. The question is whether you’re willing to let God love your enemy through you — even when every fiber of your being screams for justice, for payback, for the satisfaction of seeing them suffer the way you suffered.
Because on the other side of that impossible obedience? Freedom. The kind of freedom that no amount of revenge could ever give you.
Reflect
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Who is the person you find hardest to love right now? What would it look like to pray genuinely for their good — even once?
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Have you confused forgiving someone with trusting them? How does understanding the difference change things?
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When have you experienced the weight of bitterness lifting? What made that possible?
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Jesus loved His enemies from the cross. How does knowing He went first change how you hear this command?
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What would your life look like — your stress, your sleep, your relationships — if you truly released the verdict against the person who hurt you most?
This is Part 3 of the series “Things Jesus Said That Nobody Wants to Hear.” In Part 2, Jesus told you to stop worrying — a command that feels impossible until you understand what He actually meant. Next time, it gets even more personal. Jesus says you have to deny yourself — pick up a cross and follow Him. Not a metaphor for mild inconvenience. A cross. The thing people died on. What does He actually mean, and why do most Christians quietly ignore it? That’s Part 4.