MAtt 5:43-48

Introduction

Matthew six passage on loving your enemies is one of my favorite in the sermon on the mountain. One because it is incredibly challenging. But that too is what makes it beautiful. It is the particularity of this passage that marks Christianity apart from any other organization or any other Form of religion in the known world right now. The Christians are to be a people who love their enemies. And not only that who pray for those who persecute us.

We will see that in our passage this morning, that we are called to something that can be very difficult. But something necessary. But why would be even want to listen to something difficult this morning? What if we are completely content hating our enemies? I mean doesn’t that just make sense? If someone hates me, shouldn’t I hate them? If someone is spiteful to me, shouldn’t I be able to do the same? This is actually pretty common in our lives. We often treat people in the same way that we think they should be treated. And often it is a reflection of how they treated us. If they treated us well then we are sunshine and rainbows. But if they treated us poorly then watch out. So we end up mostly treating each other based on these small interactions that build over time. We aren’t treating people based on principle, based on Scripture, based on how we are treated by God, but rather, we often treat people based on petty vengeance.

In 2019 there was a man who was telling his neighbors that he was going to kill them with kindness. That saying gets traction when we want to let people know that we are going to love them until it hurts us. That the goal in killing someone with kindness is to support and love them no matter the cost. Well, this neighbor meant “kill with kindness” a little more literally. He took a machete and wrote the word “kindness” on it, thereby naming his machete kindness, and went over to kill his neighbor, with, kindness.

This is both funny and alarming. It is alarming in the use of violence on a neighbor but also alarming as a metaphor. We may not use machete’s named “kindness” but we will often dress up anger and pettiness in the name of love and truth. Or we love to use our petty antics to respond to people in annoyance or anger. And that can be with the people that we love. How could we ever love our enemies? Hatred seems so much easier.

This morning we are going to look at that idea. And we will find that loving our enemies will begin with an unsurprising source. But One that we often don’t invite to the discussion when we are dealing with people we would rather hate.

Matthew 5:43–44 ESV

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

This seems like the morally responsible thing to do.

Jesus is not saying the law specifically states that we should hate our enemy. He is rather, it seems, pointing to a normative feature of the human condition. That of course it makes sense to love our neighbor and hate our enemy.

Jesus is quickly going to turn our attention away from this. But why? Why is it better that we love our enemy?

Hatred depletes

But let’s say you are right in your judgement. Someone has deeply wronged you. You bear the scars of that act. The you have heard it said makes sense. Hate your enemy. Perfect. But the problem with Hatred is that it will entirely deplete you.

Hatred, at its core is a rejection of another person, a resistance of them. So to hate someone you are creating a sort of friction between you and the other person and whatever it is they are associated with. And what does friction do? It utilizes more energy. If there is friction between two objects, it will take much more energy to move one of the objects. Anger is friction. Some of us are living with a lot of friction between others and we are called, as Christians, to release that hatred and love others.

And also How would you define your enemy? Someone who did something bad to you? Someone who hurt you? Someone you are in conflict with? Someone who kept you from reaching some sort of goal you had? Sometimes we define our enemy simply by the fact that they are unlike us entirely. It may not be that they have done anything wrong. But they just don’t look, sound or act (or vote) like us.

So now an enemy is anyone you personally consider to be other than you, or who has hurt you. The people you consider to be your enemy you have had to personally curate and choose.

What if your scale, how you determine who is and is not an enemy, is broken? What if it isn’t, by its own definition, just? What if your ideas of justice are not completely in order? Then you begin determining who is more or less important based on your ideas. This is where we get mired in pettiness and vengeance and revenge. We have this internal compass that evaluates our world around us all the time, it works on overtime, but is not always correct.

seesaw. 9 cousins. Always tried to balance with lighter cousins. Never got it right. That’s how to try to bring justice. For, one side of the seesaw

So we are left with this command that we are called to love not hate our enemy. How do we even begin to do that?

What is our way forward?

Matt:5:45

English Standard Version Chapter 5

45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

This is an interesting turn of phrase Jesus gives us. Love your enemy so that you may be sons (and daughters) of heaven. There is a direct connection that is made between how we love and our understanding of being a child of God. That when we love our enemy, not that we become God’s children, but rather, that we look like God’s children. We reflect His nature.

So what does it mean to be a son of your father in heaven? It means that when we love our enemies we are acting in the way God acts.

And if you want good news this morning it is profoundly that God loves His enemies.

He loves those who have turned against Him. He loves those who have raised arms of resistance and rejection against Him. He loves the lost and the hurting. He loves the angry and the angering. We see this reflected in the next part of the passage.

Matt 5:45

English Standard Version Chapter 5

For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46

Jesus is not making claims on weather patterns, or what God can do.

What we are forced to look at here it’s not what God can do or how God exactly works through precipitation, but rather and much more importantly, what is God like. What we have to contend with that is much more important than what God can do is what kind of God do we have?

And Christ Himself shows us what kind of God we have. A God who is gives both sun and rain (remember an agrarian culture) to the good and the wicked.

This doesn’t mean He approves of the work of the wicked, or doesn’t oppose it, it just means that there is still room for them in His kingdom.

It’s important that we stop here and remember that no matter where we are now, at some point in our lives we have been the wicked and the unjust. We have resisted God entirely. And it is because of His very nature that we were brought into His kingdom. So no matter whatever you consider your enemy is, you have been there too. It is good to remember what God is like. It helps us to welcome our enemies.

Matthew 5:46–47 ESV

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

This is the hard work of followers of Jesus. To always have room to welcome those, to greet those, to bless those who we disagree with.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to disagree with them. We can still disagree with actions and perspective and ideals, but the command is to greet and welcome others.

To do so is the invitation into a better kingdom. It is the invitation into something more and better.

Matthew 5:48 ESV

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The church must be the more peculiar ones in this culture. That we do become more and more unconditional as the world becomes more conditional. That we show grace and we show love unconditionally. That we grapple with why it is we have enemies in the first place.

The church is Called to love her enemies. No one else is. But that means that we have to go first. We have got to cross lines first. That we have to embrace first, welcome first, invite in first.

And we can do that because in every one of those instances, Christ has gone first. He has invited first. He had come to us first. He became human, came to us first. He forgave our sin first. He offered eternal life first.

This morning, love your enemy.

Begin by praying for them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says:

I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner.

Because prayer lines up the individual before Christ. We cannot look to Christ without looking to the other first.

Love your enemy.

Maybe it is God. Enter into His embrace.

Maybe it is someone in this room. Forgive and be forgiven.

Maybe it is someone else specifically. Talk to us after and we can discuss what reconciliation looks like with them

Maybe it’s you.

Maybe it’s a people group, or a public group, or a political group. The call is still to love. Move toward reconciliation. Maybe you will need to repent of how you have thought of or acted toward. Christ meets us in those places

We live reconciled lives in Christ. We have been reconciled, we are marked as reconciled, and we are reconciling. That which is broken is coming back whole. That is what it means to be perfect, or whole or unconditional.

When we feel lost, or slighted, or defensive, we often feel like we have to fight for some part of lost ground. Or grapple with something that we don’t have. But for the Christian, we cannot be lost, we have everything that we could need in Christ. If you have everything you need, and there’s no need to fight for anything. If you can’t get lost, then you don’t have to grapple with someone in order to feel found.

The church is in the perfect place to love her enemy. Because the church has been given everything that the human condition needs to not have to fight any longer. We are found in Christ and completely placed in Him.