Loving Your Enemies

Reading these passages

Jesus opens this teaching by quoting scripture, and half of what he quotes is not in it.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. The first clause is Leviticus 19:18, word for word. The second appears nowhere in the Old Testament. There is no verse anywhere in it instructing anyone to hate an enemy, and Leviticus itself runs the other way two verses earlier, forbidding grudges outright: Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

So Jesus is not correcting the Law. He is correcting a summary of the Law that people had arrived at — the natural inference from a command that specifies neighbours, which is that everyone else is fair game. The Qumran community wrote something very close to it into their rule book, instructing members to love the sons of light and hate the sons of darkness, so the sentiment was not invented for the sermon. It was in the air. What Jesus attacks is not a text but a reading.

Under occupation

The people listening were living under military occupation, and that is not background colour. It determines who enemy meant.

A few lines earlier in the same sermon Jesus says whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. The verb translated compel is a technical term for the right of a Roman soldier to require a civilian to carry his equipment. It is not a metaphor for going above and beyond at work. It is a specific, humiliating legal power that the audience was subject to, and the instruction is to double it voluntarily.

So when the command arrives — Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you — the enemies in view are not difficult relatives. They are an occupying army and its collaborators. This is the hardest possible case, chosen deliberately, and it is worth holding onto when the verse gets applied to smaller grievances.

Notice too that all four verbs are things you do. Love, bless, do good, pray. Not one of them is feel. Whatever the command requires, it does not begin by requiring the affection to arrive first — which is the objection most people raise to it, and the text has quietly declined to make that a precondition.

Coals of fire

Paul quotes Proverbs to make the practical case, and lands on an image nobody has fully explained: Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

Three readings have serious support and they are not compatible.

The oldest takes the coals as shame — the burning face of someone confronted with kindness he cannot justify, and the good done to him working on his conscience until it changes him. This is how most of the early commentators read it, and it fits the sentence that follows, overcome evil with good, which describes a victory rather than a punishment.

A second reading, argued from Egyptian sources, points to a penitence ritual in which a person carried a pan of burning coals on his head as a public sign of contrition. On that reading the phrase means you will bring him to repentance, and the coals belong to him rather than being inflicted by you.

The third reading is the uncomfortable one, and it takes the coals as judgment: kindness that the enemy refuses only deepens what is owed, and the verse is telling you to leave him to God — which sits well with the verse two lines above about vengeance being God's, and rather badly with the general tone.

Proverbs, where the line comes from, adds a clause Paul leaves out: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee. That does not settle it either. This page will not pretend the question is closed; what all three readings agree on is the instruction, which is to feed him.

Not a feeling, a refusal

Peter states the same thing negatively, and the phrasing is worth slowing down for: Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.

Rendering is a commercial word — paying back what is owed. The picture is of a transaction being declined. And the reason given is not that the other person deserves better, which would be untrue in most of the cases the verse covers. It is that this is what you were called to, and that a blessing is the inheritance attached.

Proverbs governs the interior with the same restraint: Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth. This is the only instruction on the page that cannot be performed. Feeding an enemy is visible; not being pleased when he fails is not, and no one would know. The proverb regulates a private satisfaction that has no external consequence at all, which tells you the concern is not with the enemy's welfare in that instance. It is with what the satisfaction does to the person having it.

Reassigned, not cancelled

Between the command and the coals sits the sentence that makes the rest workable: Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

Paul is quoting Deuteronomy, from the Song of Moses, and the quotation is doing specific work. He is not saying the wrong was small, or that it did not happen, or that the enemy is misunderstood. He grants the whole case. What he removes is the reader's standing to act on it. Vengeance is not abolished in that sentence; it is transferred to a different jurisdiction, and the reason you may stand down is that someone else has taken the file.

There is an ambiguity in the middle of it that commentators have never fully agreed on. Give place unto wrath — whose? Most read it as God's: step aside and leave room for it, which the quotation immediately following supports. Some read it as your own, meaning give your anger somewhere to go rather than discharging it on the person. The first is better supported. The practical instruction is identical either way.

Luke's version of the sermon puts the same restraint in a different key. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. Judging is an opinion; condemning is a verdict. Both are withheld before forgiveness is even mentioned — which is an order worth noticing, because it means the verse is not asking you to conclude that the enemy was innocent. It is asking you not to be the one who rules on it.

Makers, not keepers

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

The Greek is eirenopoioi — peace-makers, from poieo, to make or manufacture. Not peace-keepers, and not the peaceable. The word describes people who produce a peace that was not there, which is active work and generally involves going into a conflict rather than staying out of one.

The distinction matters because the beatitude is often heard as praise for a temperament — the calm, the conflict-averse, those who do not make trouble. That is nearly the opposite of what the word says. A person who avoids all conflict makes no peace; he merely declines to disturb an existing state, which may not be peace at all.

And the reward is a name rather than a benefit: they shall be called the children of God. In the logic of the sermon, making peace is the family resemblance. It is the thing that identifies whose you are, which is also why the command to love enemies is grounded, a few verses later, in what God does with his own.

Which leaves Romans 12:21 as the summary, and it is framed as a contest rather than a duty: Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. Paul does not argue that retaliation is wrong, though he plainly thinks it is. He says it is losing. The person who answers in kind has been beaten by the thing he was fighting, and has become another unit of it.