“Love your enemies”

Read Luke 6:27-31

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Love is at the heart of Jesus’s teaching about the way of life in God’s kingdom – love for God and neighbour (Mt.22:36-39), love for fellow Christians (Jn.13:34-35), and even love for enemies (27). Such love is practical. It’s about doing good to people who hate us and who do us wrong (27; 6:35), choosing to pray for them and to be a means of blessing to them (28).

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Love insists that we do “not repay anyone evil for evil” but instead “overcome evil with good” (Rom.12:17,21) and Jesus gives some very challenging examples of how that works in practice (29-30). His purpose was not to encourage injustice, but when wrong is done to us personally then we are to follow the example of Jesus who “when they hurled their insults at him did not retaliate" (1 Pet.2:23-24).

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This is well summed up by a single Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (31). This verse comes later in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.7:12) but it’s an appropriate conclusion to this section about showing practical love to our enemies. Self-interest is itself the enemy of self-less love, but even our self-interest can teach us what is the good and loving thing to do in every different situation.