Matthew
5:43-48
43 "You have heard that it was said,
‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I say to you, Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for
he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the
righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For
if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax
collectors do the same? 47 And
if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are
you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your
heavenly Father is perfect.
I love peanut butter. Really, if peanut butter is listed
among the ingredients in a recipe there is an increased likelihood I will eat
it. I’ve always loved peanut butter. Maybe it’s a genetic thing, perhaps passed
down to me from my father’s side of the family. Maybe it’s a simple matter of
personal taste, or maybe it has something to do with the nature of my mother’s
diet while she carried me for nine months (at least that seems to be her
theory). Of course, there’s a very good chance it has to do with my upbringing
in South Alabama, a part of the world transformed by the creation of all things
peanut (including peanut butter).Whatever the case may be, I love peanut
butter.
But I also love baseball. My happiest memories from my
childhood involve the “ping” of metal bats on a chilly, mid-spring night, the
taste of lemon-lime Gatorade, and the smell of freshly mowed grass in the early
summer. I can remember, when I was in the third grade, my mom picking me up
from school, saying we had to go to the rec. center (which, at the time, I
thought had something to do with my step-dad being in a car accident). I heard
her telling a man my name, my birthday, and when I asked why she was telling
him those things, she told me I was going to get to play baseball—real,
league-organized, baseball—for the first time. Ever since, I have loved
baseball.
I have also, however, been heard saying I love: sweaters,
bacon, shrimp, once upon a time I was even heard saying I love NASCAR (thankfully,
the Lord has since forgiven such an iniquity). In fact, I bet over the course
of my life I have professed my love for all sorts of things from gummy worms to
golf on a sunny day. Of course, I bet if I asked each of you, and you were
honest with yourself and me, you’d likely have similar confessions. I can make
a pretty fair guess that many of you have professed your love for Alabama or
Auburn football, fishing, fried catfish, etc. The truth is, we’ve all said the
words, “I love (insert some object or activity that brings us happiness).” Of
course, the deeper truth is that we really don’t love the sorts of things we say we love, or if we do, we have a
tragically flawed understanding of what love
actually is.
This season of Advent (of Christmas) seems as good a time
as any to reorient ourselves with a biblical understanding of what love
actually is. We come close to getting it right I suppose, with the desire to
gather with family and friends to share one of the most important holidays of
the year. I suppose we may even come a little closer to that biblical
understanding of love when we place a couple of folded dollar bills through the
slot of a Salvation Army red kettle as we leave with our bags of gifts for
those more fortunate. We may even convince ourselves that we have love all
figured out as we sing Christmas carols and allow our hearts to be overwhelmed
with the warm feelings of childhood memories. But in the end, what shapes our
understanding of love? What in our lives defines love for us? What in our lives
gets to decide who is worthy of our love? Is it culture? Is it context? Is it
comfort?
That seems to be
what was happening in the early years of the first century. You can hear it in
Jesus’ words in verse 43: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall
love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'” Now, at first glance, there
doesn’t seem to be a whole lot wrong with Jesus’ claim here. The notion of
loving one’s neighbor runs throughout the entire canon of the Hebrew Bible, our
Old Testament. It can be found early on in the words of the Law; it’s in the
books chronicling the history of Israel and Judah; it’s a prominent theme
throughout the writings of the prophets. To love one’s neighbor was a given;
everyone who attended the local synagogue or brought sacrifices to the temple
would have heard such a commandment at some time or another. Furthermore, in
the minds of many it would only make sense that if God calls His people to love
their neighbor, surely he must call them to hate their enemies. After all, it
seems natural to arrive at such a conclusion when a Jew in the first century
looked around only to see the oppressive power of Rome’s empire on every
corner. “Love my neighbor,” one may have thought, “that’s easy. After all, they
are the same as me. But these heathen Romans…I hate them!”
Now, this is
where culture seems to be defining love more than the teachings of God in
Scripture. You see, while love of neighbor runs throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures, never is hatred of one’s enemies ever mentioned. You’d be
stretching to say that God’s hatred of idols or His commands to wipe out the
peoples in Canaan during Joshua’s time is an example of hating one’s enemies.
No, this idea of hating one’s enemies comes directly from the surrounding
culture; it comes directly from the minds and hearts of a people who look
around them and see threats to their very way of life. The sad thing is,
however, I don’t believe we are much different.
What tends to define love for us? Isn’t it the culture we
live in? Now, don’t be too quick to jump to some conclusion that I’m talking
about who can and who can’t get married. No, what I’m talking about is how we
allow our own sense of vulnerability to determine who is or isn’t worthy of our
love. We have a hard enough time dealing with loving our neighbors. In fact, we
live in a culture that seeks to create more and more space between us and our
neighbors. We build fences, plant bushes, buy bigger lots of land, and many of
us hardly know our neighbors’ names. We create communities with the purpose of
excluding those with whom we do not wish to associate. So the command to “love
our neighbors” is hard enough. If we were simply able to accomplish that,
wouldn’t that be a statement to those around us that we are different, that the
Spirit of Christ in us causes us to stand out from the culture in our love for
others? Well…maybe, but there is a lot more to love than that.
Jesus doesn’t give us a lot of time to process his words
in verse 43 before redefining love
in verse 44: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you.” This is where I imagine Jesus may have heard a gasp from the
crown gathered around the mount. “Ok, Jesus. We get the whole ‘love your
neighbor’ thing, but you’ve gone too far! ‘Love our enemies?!’ Don’t you know
who they are? They’re Romans, the ones who’ve been oppressing us with taxes,
bullying us around in our own homeland. They’re the ones who, even now, are
forcing the temple priests to make offering on behalf of the Caesar. How can
you tell us that we should love such an enemy when they threaten our very
lives?!” Of course, I don’t imagine Jesus scored any points with them by
telling them they should pray for their persecutors either!
Think about how crazy Jesus’ words must have sounded to
these people. They lived under the authority of the Roman Empire; Matthew’s
original audience would have heard this story with images of a smoldering,
sacked Jerusalem taken and burned the hands of the Roman army. The very notion
to love the enemy or to pray for the ones who persecuted them would have been
considered foolish, if not downright insane! Yet those were Jesus’ words to
them; those are Jesus’ words to us.
Think about it. Are we so different? We have enemies,
don’t we? Just this past week we saw the “official” end of the war in Iraq, and
how many of us viewed them as enemies? Did you ever stop to pray for them—those
who we were fighting? Did you ever stop to consider that Christ loves them and
calls us to love them? What about members of Al Quida, the Taliban, or the
other “radical Islamists” that the news channels keep warning us about? If we
count them as enemies, Christ calls us to love them and to pray for them. Then
there are those who we refer to as “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented
workers.” We are told they will take our jobs, they will threaten our way of
life because they are increasing our tax burden all while speaking less than a
word of English. There are many who would consider them enemies because they
threaten our culture and our way of life. But there again we hear Christ’s
words: “Love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you.”
But why, Jesus?
Why do we have to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? Why
should we care about those who seek to do us harm, those who threaten our very way
of life? Doesn’t he tell us in verses 45-48? “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his
sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on
the unrighteous. 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
and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do
the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Why should we love our enemies? Why should we pray for those who persecute us?
Because we are called to be children of God, and as children of God we are
called to be perfect, to be holy, just as He is perfect, just as He is holy.
After all,
didn’t God do the very thing He calls us to do with these words? Haven’t we
been enemies of God, striving to do our own thing, what we want to do? Haven’t
we, as a collective species of humankind, sought to eliminate God by force or
by reason? Throughout history, have we not persecuted those who have come with
a word from God (the prophets), have we not persecuted God as he sought to
correct us and call us back to Himself? Are we not the very reason Christ was
born on that first Christmas morning, to live a life of love and die a cruel
death on our behalf? Why should we love our enemies and pray for those who
persecute us? Because God has done the very thing Himself in loving us! So who
are we to say that our enemies do not deserve our love or our persecutors our
prayers?
In this season
of hope, peace, joy, and love, let us seek to fulfill our role as children of
God. Let us work to end hatred in our own circles of influence. Let us love one
another and those we claim to be our enemies so that the good news of Christ’s
birth may not be some hollow shell filled with selfish consumerism. Let us, as
children of God and followers of Jesus Christ, be indwelled by the Holy Spirit
so that we may be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.
Let us pray…
