Day 2 of 10
The Sermon on the Mount and Enemy Love
What Jesus actually says — and what it costs to obey
Scripture Readings
Today's Scripture
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."
Matthew 5:44-45 — "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."
Romans 12:21 — "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
The Big Idea
Jesus commands his followers to love their actual enemies — not to feel fond of them, but to act for their good and pray for them by name. This is the hardest thing he ever asked, and every Christian conversation about war has to start here, because Jesus did not offer it as advice. He offered it as the family resemblance of God's children.
Reflection
The rule that stopped revenge
Picture two kids in the back seat of a car. One punches the other. The second punches back — harder. The first responds harder still, and within a minute someone is screaming and nobody remembers who started it. That is not just childhood. That is the history of nations.
The Old Testament law Jesus quotes was designed to stop exactly that spiral. Exodus 21:23-25 — "you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." It sounds brutal to us, but in its world it was a leash, not a license. The rule scholars call lex talionis — Latin for "the law of retaliation" — meant the payback could never exceed the injury. One eye, not two. One tooth, not a jawful. It capped revenge so blood feuds could not swallow whole families.
Jesus does not loosen that leash. He shortens it to zero. Matthew 5:38-39 — "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." Where the old law limited revenge, Jesus removes the disciple from the revenge business entirely.
Look closely at his examples, though, because "turn the other cheek" is not "lie down and disappear." A slap on the right cheek, in a right-handed world, is a backhand — the blow a master gives a slave, an insult meant to put you beneath contempt. Turning the other cheek makes the striker face you as an equal. Giving the cloak too, walking the second mile, giving to the one who begs — each is a free action by a person who refuses to play either of the only two roles the world offers: victim or avenger. The doormat says nothing. The avenger says "you'll pay." The disciple says, by a costly act, you do not own me, and I will not become you.
Love your actual enemy
Then comes the summit. Matthew 5:44 — "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Luke's version makes it even more concrete: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you" (Luke 6:27-28).
Two words need defining. The Greek word for "love" here is a command to act — to will and work for someone's good — not an order to manufacture warm feelings. And "enemy" is the strong word. Not your annoying sibling. The occupying soldier. The persecutor. The person who actually wants what you love destroyed. Jesus adds the reason in Luke 6:35: "you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil." Enemy love is what God is like. Sunrise on the evil and the good. Rain on the just and the unjust.
The first three centuries of the church took this with breathtaking seriousness. Tertullian, a fiery North African writer around the year 211, looked at the scene where Jesus stopped Peter's sword and drew a sweeping conclusion:
"Christ, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier." — Tertullian, On Idolatry
His contemporary Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, looked out at the empire's endless wars and named a hypocrisy we have still not escaped:
"The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale." — Cyprian of Carthage, To Donatus
Kill one man and you are a criminal. Kill ten thousand under a flag and you get a parade. Cyprian refused to let scale launder the deed. And Origen, the great teacher of Alexandria, answered the pagan critic Celsus — who complained that Christians would not join the army — by saying Christians fight for the emperor in a different way:
"We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army — an army of piety — by offering our prayers to God." — Origen, Against Celsus
Whether or not you land where they landed, do not rush past them. These are not modern activists projecting politics onto Jesus. They are the church's first interpreters, closest in time to the apostles, and when they read "love your enemies," they heard a command that reached all the way down to the sword in their hands.
Not a doormat, not a tactic
Paul carries the teaching straight into church life. Romans 12:17-19 — "Repay no one evil for evil... If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God." Then he gets practical, quoting Proverbs 25:21-22: "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink" (Romans 12:20). And he lands on the summary verse of the whole Christian ethic of enemies: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21).
Notice what that verse assumes: evil is trying to overcome you. Not just hurt you — recruit you. Every act of hatred is an invitation to hate back, and the moment you accept, evil has two servants instead of one. Martin Luther King Jr., who faced bombs and dogs and prison with this exact teaching in hand, explained the logic:
"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
But be careful here, because there are two cheap counterfeit versions of this teaching, and Jesus refuses both.
The first counterfeit is the doormat: absorb everything silently, make yourself small, call your fear "meekness." Jesus does not look like that in the Gospels. He flips tables in the temple. He calls Herod "that fox." He confronts the powerful to their faces. Enemy love has a spine.
The second counterfeit is the tactic: be kind to your enemies because kindness works — it wins them over, it looks good, it gets results. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. Jesus never promises that the other cheek will melt the striker's heart; sometimes the striker just hits the other cheek. The command stands anyway, because its root is not effectiveness but family likeness: "that you may be sons of your Father." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, calling the churches of Europe to peace in 1934 — five years before the catastrophe — named the cost honestly:
"There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fanø address
Peace is not the safe option. It is a risk you take with your own body, the way Jesus took it with his.
The enemy-love of God
Why would anyone live this way? Peter gives the answer in one sentence about Jesus: "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" (1 Peter 2:23). And he frames it as our pattern: "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps" (1 Peter 2:21).
Then comes the moment where the Sermon on the Mount stops being a sermon. Nailed to a Roman cross by the very soldiers an angel army could have flattened, Jesus prays: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). He does not merely teach enemy love. He performs it, at the precise moment his enemies are killing him.
C.S. Lewis — who fought in the trenches of World War I and was no pacifist — understood that even a Christian soldier must never surrender his heart to hatred:
"I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
You may or may not follow Lewis's conclusions about war — that debate is still ahead of us. But notice what he refuses to do: he refuses to hate. The enemy remains a human being, a possible friend, a soul.
And here is the gospel turn, the place where this whole teaching stops crushing us and starts carrying us. You and I are not, first of all, the heroes of this story who must summon the strength to love our enemies. We are the enemies who got loved. 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." While we were enemies. That is our biography in three words. John Stott stood at this exact spot:
"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ
God did not love his enemies from a safe distance. He came down into the blast radius. And Tim Keller explains why forgiving real evil always costs the forgiver:
"Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy's renewal and change... Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears." — Tim Keller, The Reason for God
Nails and blood. Keller chose those words deliberately, because that is what it cost God. Enemy love is not a technique for nicer people. It is the shape of the cross, pressed into the lives of people who have been forgiven much. You will not love your enemies by trying harder. You will love them — slowly, imperfectly, with relapses — by staring long enough at the One who loved you when you were one.
Going Deeper
Read Matthew 5:43-48 aloud, slowly, twice. Then name one specific person — not a category, a person — to whom this command is hardest to apply right now. Pray for them by name, using the verbs of the passage: "Father, bless them. Do them good. Bring them to yourself." One honest minute is enough. Notice what the prayer surfaces in you — resistance, grief, maybe nothing at all — and offer that to God too. That noticing is the beginning of obedience.
Key Quotes
“Christ, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier.”
“The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale.”
“We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army — an army of piety — by offering our prayers to God.”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture.”
“I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.”
“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”
“Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy's renewal and change... Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.”
Prayer Focus
Pray by name for one specific person you would call an enemy — someone you avoid, resent, or fear. Ask God to bless them, to do them good, to bring them to himself. Notice what rises in you as you pray, and tell God about that too.
Meditation
Read Matthew 5:43-48 aloud, slowly. The command is not to feel warmly toward enemies but to love them — to act, to bless, to pray. Where in your week is there one concrete place to obey: a word held back, a kindness offered, a prayer prayed for someone you would rather not pray for?
Question for Discussion
Tertullian believed Jesus's words ruled out the sword for any disciple. Bonhoeffer read the same text, called it the heart of discipleship — and ten years later joined a plot to kill Hitler. Is there a way to read the Sermon on the Mount that holds together both the radical demand and the recognition of evil that must be resisted?