3 Reasons We Don’t Take Jesus’ Command to Love Our Enemies Seriously
By Michael Kelley
Much has been written in the last several years about the culture of an organization, and a leader’s importance in forming that culture. If you start down the rabbit hole of that kind of reading, you’ll find all kinds of articles, books, and podcasts about developing a mission statement, defining core values, and clarifying purpose.
What you’ll also find is the ready acknowledgment from experts that the majority of those companies don’t follow through on those things after they’ve done the hard work of articulating them. What usually ends up happening is that a leadership team articulates the “core values” of an organization, distributes them to employees, makes a few posters to hang up, prints a t-shirt… and that’s it.
The organization might be able to repeat these core values, but they certainly don’t live by them. They don’t guide their decisions or spending. They don’t evaluate their work according to them. They’re just, in the end, some clever statements hung on the wall.
Surely there are also many commands from Jesus that function just like that - we have heard them; we can repeat them; but we certainly don’t live by them. Not really. We find one such command in Matthew 5:43-45:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children 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.”
Why don’t we take this command to love our enemies seriously? Perhaps three reasons:
1. Because we don’t think we actually have enemies.
“Enemy” is a harsh word, especially in a culture whose chief virtue is tolerance. We want to be nice people, and we want people to be nice to us. To say, then, that we should “love our enemies” seems a little antiquated and outdated.
But perhaps we need to broaden our definition just a bit.
Just as Jesus won’t let us settle for the minimum as we seek to answer the question, “Who is your neighbor?” surely He won’t allow us the same luxury in answering the question, “Who is my enemy?”
In light of that, then our enemies really become those upon whom we wish harm.
Through that lens, we really should think more carefully about the claim that we don’t have enemies, because there are certainly people who we might not outright confront or fight, but those in whose failures and shame we will revel.
2. Because we see our case as a special circumstance.
We are “yeah, but” kind of people. We see signs prohibiting food and drink, and we think Yeah, but… We come to a stall in traffic as people are waiting in line for an exist, and we think Yeah, but… We see that a form must be filled out for this thing or that, and we think Yeah, but…
We love to think of ourselves as exceptions, and when it comes to loving our enemies, we do the same thing. We read this command from Jesus, and we justify our hatred by claiming that we have been hurt too deeply, betrayed too profoundly, or lost too much. Another reason we fail to take this command seriously is because we think of our specific case as the loophole.
3. We find comfort in our hatred.
One final reason we fail to take Jesus’ command seriously is simply because we don’t want to. And we don’t want to because we actually find comfort in our hatred. In an unhealthy, strange, and non-productive way, we draw strength and energy from that hatred. It fuels us.
Because it does, we simply cannot let it go, much less do the opposite of it. We hang onto the hatred because we enjoy it.
So what do we do? What do we do when we recognize that we do actually have enemies, that we aren’t a special exemption, and that we actually enjoy hating others? Perhaps the beginning point is to simply acknowledge that fact to Jesus. We own it, trusting that He is merciful and full of grace and will forgive us.
And then we begin to pray for that other person. We pray for their well-being. We pray for their blessing. We pray for their health or safety or growth. We pray, and the longer we pray, we find that it’s very hard to hate the person that you are bringing to God’s throne on a daily basis.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
