Loving the Enemy in Real Time

Today's Scripture

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."

Ephesians 2:14 — "For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility."

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."

The Big Idea

Loving your enemies is not a feeling you wait for. It is a practice you start — and the training ground Jesus assigned is prayer. Today we stop discussing war in general and do the one thing every Christian can do about the wars actually happening: pray, by name, for the people on the other side.

Reflection

The command nobody waters down by accident

For eight days we have watched Christians disagree about almost everything — except this. Matthew 5:44-45 — "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." Just-war Christians and pacifist Christians read this verse differently when it comes to swords. Neither tradition has ever found a way around the praying. The command is not "feel warmly toward your enemies." It is a verb you can schedule: pray for them.

Notice Jesus's logic. God sends sun and rain on people who hate him — daily, deliberate kindness to his enemies. To pray for your enemy is to join the family business. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his great chapter on this verse, explained what the praying actually does:

"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

You cannot keep someone purely as an enemy while standing next to him before God's throne. Prayer moves you, even if it never moves him. Paul made this the church's first public habit: "First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions" (1 Timothy 2:1-2). When Paul wrote that, the man in the highest position was Nero — an emperor who would soon be burning Christians. Pray for him anyway. First of all.

The early church was famous for exactly this. Justin Martyr, writing an open letter to the emperor around AD 155, described what conversion had done to ordinary people:

"We who hated and destroyed one another... now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies." — Justin Martyr, First Apology

Here is a concrete way in. Your phone buzzes with war news this week — it will. Let the notification become a bell for prayer. Ten seconds, on the spot, for someone on the side you like least: a soldier, a politician, a mother in a shelter. Not "Lord, help them lose." Just: Lord, let them live, and let them know you. If you only ever pray for one side, you have not yet prayed Matthew 5:44.

What to do with the rage

But what if you cannot pray nicely? What if the war has taken something from you, and what is actually in your heart is fury?

The Bible has a prayer for that, and it is terrifying. Psalm 137 begins in grief — "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion" — and ends with exiles wishing on Babylon what Babylon did to them: "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" (Psalm 137:9). These are people who watched their own children die. Psalms like this are called imprecatory — an old word meaning they call down judgment. Why is this in the Bible?

Because of where the rage is taken. Not to a weapon. Not to a mob. To God. The psalm is not a plan; it is a handover. That is exactly the move Paul commands: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord'" (Romans 12:19). You can release revenge only if Someone trustworthy is taking the case. Then Paul tells you what your hands are now free to do: "if your enemy is hungry, feed him... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:20-21).

Martin Luther King Jr., preaching on enemy-love while his own house was being bombed, explained why the handover matters — not just for your soul but for the world:

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. 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

And the theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who wrote about forgiveness while his own homeland was at war, named the lie that keeps the rage circulating:

"Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners." — Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

Read that slowly. Hatred requires two fictions: they are monsters, and I am innocent. Psalm 137 prayed honestly destroys the second fiction; Matthew 5:44 prayed honestly destroys the first.

One table across the lines

There is something the church can show a warring world that no peace conference can. Ephesians 2:13-14 — "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility." Paul wrote that about Jews and Gentiles — two groups with centuries of contempt between them — now eating at one table because of the cross.

That table still stands, and it still crosses every battle line. In every modern war, there have been Christians on both sides — which means that every Sunday, somewhere, the church takes communion in two countries that are shooting at each other. The nations draw a line; the Lord's Table quietly refuses to honor it. When your congregation gathers this week, you are in fellowship with believers in the country your country trusts least.

This is not a sentimental idea. It is a fact with edges. Somewhere right now, a Ukrainian believer and a Russian believer are praying to the same Father in the same words Jesus taught. Their governments are at war; their baptism is not. The church is the only institution on earth with loyal members on both sides of every front line — which makes it either hopelessly compromised or, as the New Testament insists, the preview of a kingdom that will outlast all the maps.

C.S. Lewis, who fought the Germans in the First World War, saw this with startling cheerfulness:

"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

That is not a joke about death. It is a claim about citizenship — the deepest one. Two soldiers in enemy uniforms, both belonging to the Lamb, were never each other's ultimate enemies at all. The uniforms were temporary. The kingdom is not.

Loved while we were enemies

Be honest, though: this is hard beyond our strength. Corrie ten Boom learned how hard. She survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her sister Betsie died. Two years after the war, a former Ravensbrück guard came up after one of her talks, hand outstretched, asking forgiveness. She stood there unable to lift her arm — until she prayed for help and obeyed first, feeling nothing.

"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

The command comes with the supply. And the supply flows from one place. At the cross, Jesus prayed for the soldiers who were nailing him down: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Stephen, the first Christian martyr, died echoing him: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:60) — while a young enemy of the church named Saul watched approvingly. That prayer was answered. Saul became Paul.

And Paul, of all people, gives us the bottom line of the whole gospel: "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" (Romans 5:10). While we were enemies. Enemy-love is not an advanced elective for unusually sweet Christians. It is the only reason any of us is a Christian at all. God did not wait for us to disarm. Tim Keller points out that this kind of forgiveness is never cheap:

"Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering." — Tim Keller, The Reason for God

Someone always absorbs the cost. At the cross, God absorbed ours. People who live downstream of that have a strange new power available to them: they can absorb a wrong without passing it on. In wartime, that power — multiplied across millions of praying Christians on every side — is the church's quiet, stubborn gift to the world.

Going Deeper

Do two prayers today, in this order. First, pray your honest Psalm 137: tell God the rage, the fear, or the disgust you actually feel about a current war or a personal enemy. Do not clean it up; hand it over. Second, pray Matthew 5:44: ask God's real good — life, peace, salvation — for one specific person on the other side. The gap between those two prayers is where discipleship lives in wartime. Walk across it as often as the news gives you the chance.