Love your enemies
Is love towards your enemy strictly for those who offend, your enemy, or is there something more, something for us as well. This passage of scripture is difficult, especially when we consider the Bondi Beach massacre. But it is there in scripture, and as a follower of Christ, I cannot ignore it.
Luke 6:27-36 NIV But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them.
Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.
And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
If this command were only for the offender, it would be noble but thin moral heroics and spiritual charity at a safe distance.
But Jesus is rarely that naïve, and never that tidy.
“Pray for your enemies” is not a sentimental gift-wrapping service for villains; it is a surgical procedure on the human heart, ours first, theirs second, and the world somewhere in the spillover.
Let us tell it straight. Enemies do not become enemies because we misunderstand them slightly, they become enemies because something in us wants them diminished, punished, erased, or at least proven wrong in public.
To pray for them is not to excuse their harm, it is to refuse to let their harm finish the job by remaking us in its image.
Here is the uncomfortable truth; hatred is efficient, it simplifies the world, it offers clarity, adrenaline, and the warm glow of moral superiority, but it does so by shrinking us. It flattens our imagination; it turns complex humans into cardboard cutouts we can safely knock over. That is not strength, that is a failure of our humanity.
So yes, this command is profoundly for us. It keeps us human when dehumanization is the easiest move on the board. It interrupts the reflex to become what hurt us. Prayer, in this context, is not pious speech, it is resistance. It is the refusal to let violence (physical, emotional, or spiritual) be the final sculptor of our inner life.
But, and this matters, it is not only for us.
When we pray for our enemies, we are quietly betting on a dangerous theological idea, that no one is beyond the reach of transformation, including the people we would rather write off as cautionary tales. This is not optimism; it is resurrection logic. And resurrection logic is deeply inconvenient, because it suggests that even our enemies are not finished projects.
Still, Jesus does not ask us to feel kindly. He asks us to act faithfully. “Do good” is wonderfully concrete. It drags prayer out of the clouds and forces it to walk the streets. Sometimes that “good” is silence, sometimes it is boundary and sometimes it is naming harm without vengeance. Holiness, it turns out, is not weakness with better lighting.
There is also a quiet genius here: prayer slows us down.
You cannot easily caricature someone you are holding before God. You may still oppose them, fiercely, but you do so without surrendering your soul to corrosion. Prayer keeps the inner weather from becoming permanently stormy. It keeps cynicism from masquerading as wisdom. (A common sin in clever people, and yes, clergy are especially good at it.)
So, what is this practice really doing?
It keeps us from becoming less than ourselves.
It keeps our moral imagination elastic.
It keeps the image of God from being selectively applied.
And occasionally, annoyingly, miraculously, it changes them too, yet not always.
Let us not pretend otherwise. Some enemies remain enemies. Jesus knew that. He was not offering a technique for conflict resolution; he was offering a way of remaining alive in a violent world.
Praying for enemies is not about being nice, it is about being free. Free from the tyranny of reaction, free from the lie that the only way to survive harm is to harden and free to remain human in a world that profits from our becoming something smaller.
If that is not for us, nothing is.
Shalom – Shalom,
Jim Varsos