Matthew 5:43-48
Love for Enemies
43 "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 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. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 9:9-13
God Desires Mercy, Not Sacrifice
9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
There is much love in Jesus' teachings...And in His first Sermon, after He chooses His Disciples, Jesus gives us the real and great test of love, when He tells us to love our enemies...How might we do this?...Because Jesus doesn't say just be nice to your enemies, or to tolerate your enemies, or to be kind to your enemies, or even just to like our enemies...No, He says to love your enemies...If we do not love our enemies, what do we feel for them...If it is hate we have toward our enemies, then this hatred, of course, is something very negative and we can never love our enemies, with hatred in our hearts...If not loving your enemy is just out of not liking people who are different from us, then we should think about this too, in the context of how we see our enemies...But regardless, His statement to love our enemies, is one that shows love is one of the foundations of His Teachings...
Then Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies...By praying for them we recognize, how we can better see how we feel about them...And by praying for them and helping them, we get closer to love and to them and have a better attitude of loving them...The more we can fill our hearts with love for our enemies and those who persecute us, the better chance we have for loving them...
So let us look inward and reflect on ourselves as we learn about loving our enemies...Somehow loving your enemies has a forgiveness and forgiving quality to it...And if you don't believe that loving your enemy is about forgiveness, then it must be about having just plain old mercy on all people, which will include our enemies...So I believe, to love your enemies, you must know and have and be willing to forgive and have mercy for all people...So if one is to have forgiveness and mercy to help them love their enemies, we must look inside ourselves for this forgiveness and mercy...We should understand better, Jesus' statement about the old sacrificial comment He made, when He said, I seek mercy and not sacrifice...If we are more merciful and more forgiving, we are better neighbors and more loving neighbors...And therefore, we are better neighbors and have a better idea of how we can love our enemies...And I might think as I read His Great Teaching that I need to expand this teaching to forgive your enemies, have mercy on your enemies, and love your enemies...
But none of this is an easy thing to do, but Jesus does not say it is an easy thing to do....It is a hard and difficult thing to love your enemies...But in that respect, many of His teachings are not easy things to do...This Great Basic Teaching of His is to be taken seriously...
Dr. Martin Luther King, summed up love for your enemy, with this comment..."Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when He gave this command; He wasn’t playing... He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies...He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you...He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard...But He wasn’t playing...And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point...This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master...Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious...We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command."...