The Extraordinary: Enemy Love

Today's Scripture

Matthew 5:43-45 — "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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

Matthew 5:46-48 — "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? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

The Big Idea

Loving people who love you is just math — an even trade the whole world already practices. Jesus calls his disciples to something Bonhoeffer named "the extraordinary": love that flows uphill, toward the very people who wish you harm. It defies all calculation, because it copies a Father who shines sunlight on his enemies — and a Son who died for them.

Reflection

The "more" that marks a disciple

Buried in today's passage is a question that should keep us up at night. "If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?... What more are you doing than others?" (Matthew 5:46-47).

What more. Bonhoeffer seized on that word. The Greek behind it is perisson — the extraordinary, the surplus, the thing beyond. Strip away everything in your Christian life that decent unbelievers also do — being kind to friends, loving family, helping people who will probably help you back — and ask what is left. That remainder, says Bonhoeffer, is the actual evidence of discipleship. And Jesus locates it in exactly one place: the love of enemies. Reciprocal love — loving those who love you — is the world's everyday economy. Enemy love breaks the economy. It gives where nothing will come back.

Be honest about who we are talking about. Not "people who mildly annoy me." Bonhoeffer refuses to let the word enemy go soft:

"By our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable and utterly unresponsive to our love, who forgive us nothing when we forgive them all, who requite our love with hatred and our service with derision." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

The person this command has in view is the one your stomach just clenched at. The parent who walked out. The friend who shared your secret. The bully, the betrayer, the online tormentor. Jesus piles up four verbs so we cannot wriggle free: Luke 6:27-28 — "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Love, do, bless, pray — actions, all four. Not one of them is a feeling. Jesus never commands us to feel fond of our enemies; he commands us to act for their good, which is mercifully possible even while the wound still aches.

Why should they get such treatment? Bonhoeffer answers with disarming logic:

"Love asks nothing in return, but seeks those who need it. And who needs our love more than those who are consumed with hatred and are utterly devoid of love?" — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

"Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred, the greater his need of love." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Read that twice, because it flips the whole question. We ask, "Does my enemy deserve love?" Bonhoeffer asks, "Does my enemy need love?" — and the more hateful they are, the more obviously the answer is yes. Hatred is not a fortress; it is a famine.

Breaking the chain

Just before the enemy-love command, Jesus dismantles the oldest rule of human conflict: Matthew 5:38-39 — "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."

You know how this works because you have lived it. One sharp text message gets a sharper reply, which gets a screenshot sent to friends, which gets a public callout — and by Friday two people who once liked each other are running a small war neither remembers starting. Every insult repaid keeps the fire fed. Evil's favorite trick is convincing each side that their blow is merely a fair response to the last one.

Bonhoeffer saw what Jesus was doing in this command — starving the fire:

"The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Evil needs retaliation the way fire needs fuel. Hit back and you hand it a fresh log. But when a blow lands on someone who absorbs it — who refuses to pass it on — the chain breaks at that link. This is not weakness; it takes far more strength to absorb a blow than to return one. Think of a lightning rod: it does not fight the lightning, it receives the strike and carries the destructive charge harmlessly into the ground. Paul compresses the strategy into one line: Romans 12:21 — "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Martin Luther King Jr., who built a whole movement on this very passage while suffering real persecution, explained why no other strategy can work:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." — Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

One caution, so we hear Jesus rightly: turning your cheek is a voluntary act of strength, not a command to let the defenseless be destroyed. Scripture also tells us to protect the weak and seek justice. The disciple renounces personal revenge — not the protection of others.

But how? Start on your knees

At this point the command can feel like being told to lift a car. C.S. Lewis, with typical honesty, admitted how everyone feels about it:

"Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So where does anyone find traction? Notice that Jesus attached a handle to his own command: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). Bonhoeffer believed prayer was not a footnote to enemy love but the engine of it:

"This is the supreme demand. Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Picture that. In prayer you walk around to your enemy's side of the table and stand next to them, facing God together — two beggars before the same throne. It is very hard to keep someone as a pure villain while you are asking God to do them good. Prayer does not always change them; it reliably changes the one praying.

Corrie ten Boom learned this at a depth few of us will ever be asked to. She was a Dutch Christian who hid Jewish neighbors in her home during the Nazi occupation, was arrested for it, and survived a concentration camp where her sister Betsie died. Years later, after speaking on forgiveness, she came face to face with one of the men who had been a guard there — now asking her forgiveness. She wrote that her hand obeyed before her heart did, and what she discovered in that moment became her testimony:

"And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

That is the secret hiding inside the impossible command. God does not point at enemy love from a distance; he supplies it. The command comes with batteries included.

The God who loved his enemies first

Why is enemy love the family trait? Because of who the Father is. Jesus grounds the command not in strategy but in heredity: love your enemies "so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good" (Matthew 5:45). Every morning, God's sun comes up on people who will use the daylight to mock him. He feeds, warms, and waters his opponents. Children resemble their parents; this is what resembling this Father looks like.

And the Son showed us the family trait in full. At the cross, with nails through his hands, Jesus prayed for the men driving them: Luke 23:34 — "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 1 Peter 2:23 — "When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly." He let all the world's evil land on him, and it ran itself to a standstill in his body. Three days later, what came out of the tomb was not vengeance but pardon. His followers caught the trait: as Stephen, the church's first martyr, was being stoned, he prayed, Acts 7:60 — "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." (One approving witness that day was a young man named Saul — who became the apostle Paul. Stephen's enemy-love prayer was answered beyond imagining.)

Here is the final turn, and it is the gospel itself: this command describes how God treated you. Romans 5:10 — "For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life." We were not God's neutral acquaintances. We were the intractable ones, the unresponsive ones — and he loved us first, at the cost of his Son. The people who know that about themselves are the only people on earth with a reason, and a power, to love their enemies. We are not climbing toward the extraordinary. We are passing on what already happened to us.

Going Deeper

Write down one name — the hardest one, the one you avoided while reading. Bonhoeffer's method is the assignment: through prayer, go stand beside that person before God. Pray one honest sentence of blessing for them every day this week — not "fix them, Lord," but "do them good, Lord." Do not wait for warm feelings; ten Boom's hand moved before her heart did. By Sunday, notice what has shifted — most likely in you.