The Sermon on the Mount and Enemy Love

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 5:38-48 carefully, twice. The first time, do not analyze; just hear. The second time, notice the structure: Jesus quotes a familiar law or saying ("You have heard that it was said..."), then recasts it ("But I say to you..."). He does this six times in the Sermon on the Mount; the last two are about retaliation and about enemy love.

Read Luke 6:27-36 as a parallel: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you."

Read Romans 12:14-21 to see how Paul takes the same teaching into the life of the church: "Repay no one evil for evil... never avenge yourselves... if your enemy is hungry, feed him."

Read 1 Peter 2:21-23: "When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten."

Reflection

The central passage of any Christian conversation about violence is Matthew 5:38-48, and most arguments about it begin badly because we have not slowed down long enough on what the text actually says.

Jesus quotes the lex talionis — "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21). The law was not, in its original setting, a license for revenge. It was a limit on revenge. In a world where blood feuds escalated without ceiling, "an eye for an eye" said: the punishment must not exceed the crime. Jesus does not abolish this principle as legislation; he relocates it. In the kingdom he announces, the disciple absorbs the blow rather than returning it.

The Greek phrase translated "Do not resist the one who is evil" in Matthew 5:39 is mē antistēnai tō ponērō. The verb anthistēmi in the Greek of Jesus's day often carried military connotations — to set oneself against, to resist with force in battle. Walter Wink and other readers have argued that Jesus is forbidding violent resistance specifically, not all resistance — that the three illustrations that follow (turn the other cheek, give your cloak too, go the second mile) are subversive but creative refusals of the oppressor's terms, not capitulation. Whether or not you accept Wink's reading in every detail, the point stands: turning the other cheek is not passivity. It is harder than passivity. The doormat says nothing; the disciple says, by an action that costs, you do not own me.

The four illustrations that follow this command — strike, lawsuit, mile, request — all involve the disciple in a posture of dignity that refuses both retaliation and submission. Then comes the climactic command: "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" (Matthew 5:43-44).

The Greek word here for "love" is agapate — the imperative form of agapaō. This is not feeling. It is the kind of love the New Testament repeatedly attributes to God: love that wills the good of the other, that acts toward the other for their welfare, that is exercised regardless of the other's response. Echthros — "enemy" — is the strong word. Not a personal annoyance, not a difficult relative. The political, religious, ethnic enemy. The Roman soldier on the corner. The collaborator who turned in your cousin. The one who actually wants you destroyed.

For three centuries, the church read this command as ruling out military service. Tertullian, around AD 211, asked plainly whether a Christian could be a soldier and answered no, observing that "Christ, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier." Justin Martyr, half a century earlier, claimed that Christians from across the empire had literally beaten their swords into plowshares. Origen, writing against the pagan critic Celsus, argued that Christians serve the empire better by their prayers than they could by their weapons. The Apostolic Tradition (often associated with Hippolytus) instructed catechumens that a soldier seeking baptism must not kill, must not take the loyalty oath in its idolatrous form, and must leave the service if commanded to do so.

This was not because the early Christians were political. It was because they were christological. Jesus had been the one who refused the sword in Gethsemane, who told Pilate his kingdom was not of this world, who absorbed the violence of the cross without returning it. To follow him was to walk that road.

After Constantine, that consensus fractured — and we will spend the next several days on the fracture. But before we go there, sit with how high the original bar was. Augustine, who eventually wrote the most influential Christian justification of war, never softened Jesus's command in his preaching. He insisted that even the soldier who carries the sword must love the enemy he kills, must desire peace, must not fight from hatred. Whatever Augustine permitted in the magistrate's hand, he never permitted in the disciple's heart.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 1937 Cost of Discipleship is, in its central chapters, an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. He treats Matthew 5 not as an impossible ideal but as the description of the disciple's actual life. "The followers of Jesus have been called to peace," he wrote. "His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others." For Bonhoeffer, enemy love is not a strategy that succeeds because the enemy is moved; it is the church's witness to the cross, which succeeds even when it fails. The disciple loves the enemy because Jesus loved his enemies — including us. To return evil for evil is to step outside the gospel.

What makes this teaching so hard is not that it is impossibly noble. It is that we instinctively split it into two cheap forms — and Jesus refuses both.

The first cheap form is the doormat reading: that Jesus tells us to absorb every injury without protest, to be silent in the face of evil, to make ourselves small. Jesus does not look like this in the Gospels. He drives the money changers from the temple. He calls Herod "that fox." He confronts the Pharisees in language that would get him uninvited from any modern dinner party. Enemy love is not invertebrate.

The second cheap form is passive aggression: returning evil with quiet contempt, with the cold shoulder, with the refusal to wish the other well in our heart while keeping our hands clean. This too is excluded. Jesus says bless and pray for — active verbs, directed at the enemy's actual good before God.

Real enemy love is harder than either. It is to look at the person who has hurt you, or who hates your nation, or who would destroy what you love, and to say in your heart, God, may you bless them. May you bring them to yourself. I will not return what they have given me. It is to mean it. It is to act on it.

This is the teaching that grounds every Christian conversation about war that follows. Whether you end up in the just-war tradition or the Anabaptist tradition, you do not get to be a Christian and skip this passage. The question is not whether Jesus meant it. He meant it. The question is what it asks of disciples whose nations are at war, whose neighbors are being killed, whose enemies are at the door.

We will spend the rest of this plan on that question. Today, read the words again and let them have their full weight before you go looking for what to do with them.

Going Deeper

Read Matthew 5:38-48 aloud, slowly, three times. After each reading, name one specific person — not a category, a person — to whom you find this command hardest to apply. Then pray for them, by name, in the words of verse 44: "Father, bless [name]. Bring them good. Soften my heart toward them." Notice what the prayer surfaces in you. That noticing is the beginning of obedience.