Loving our enemies is a valuable test for us because in their case we know that we aren't being motivated by our own ego. With others we can easily convince ourselves that our love is altruistic while still being motivated mostly by what we ourselves receive. Yes, at times and in certain contexts it may seem to be primarily us giving and others receiving. But still, we may do such things for the way it makes others think about us, or the way it enables us to think about ourselves. Not so with enemies. With them our egos are chaffed as we go against our natural disposition to hostility and instead respond with kindness.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
While we don't care to admit it we do tend to put people into categories. There are those we see as deserving of our love and those we see as having disqualified themselves. We might easily buy a coffee and a sandwich for someone with no place to live and no job. But we could hardly be bothered to even spare a polite word to someone with an opposite political point of view to our own. To give food to the hungry is obviously a good thing. But it is also something that more easily conduces to feeling good. To greet others who are not are political brothers with nothing but sincerity and kindness means by definition that we don't feeling smug and superior as a consequence. But it does make us more like Jesus who came to call everyone, not just those who were already onboard with his program, since, indeed, no one was.
When we manage to love our enemies we become the peacemakers who will be called the sons of God. And therefore Jesus says, "you may be children of your heavenly Father". His love does not discrimination on the basis of who can reciprocate, since, after all, none of us can. It does not exclude even enemies. For if it did, we ourselves would never have been able to become his friends. He died for us while we were still hostile to him. But now he really does call us his friends (see John 15:15). And this is meant to be the model for our own love. It is not mere subjective abstraction. It is not just imaging that we have no enemies, or pretending a love which is merely in our minds. It is a love for enemies that is so real that it actually has a chance of turning them into our friends.
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Let's stop making judgments about who is deserving and who is not. We don't have to enable or empower those given over to evil. But we do have to love them, and not merely in words. If they are in fact as given over to evil as we imagine, it may be because they have not known such love as Jesus enjoins on us. They may have experienced life where they felt they had to earn every affirmation they received. They may not know that they have value that is independent of anything they can do, simply because God made them and he loves them. But, in a small way, we can help to reveal this to them.
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
The call to be perfect means many things. But today, for our purposes we can think about it as having no blind spots in our compassion. Thus, if we do have enemies, we have opportunities, opportunities to love even without obvious reward, to become peacemakers, and to reveal God's love to the world.
The Maranatha Singers - He Is Our Peace
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