Love Your Enemies. Do Good to Those Who Hate You | Meditation on Luke 6:27-38

A Meditation on the Word of God | Luke 6:27-38

What is the rationale for such a command? The Lord Jesus gives it in verse 25: “…and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.” In other words, when our Lord calls us to a love that extends even to the enemy—even to those who hate us and revile us—he is calling us to the love by which he himself loved us and the world. Christ died for sinners who hated him. He prayed for the forgiveness of those who nailed him to the cross. He never met hatred in kind but always sought to overcome it with love. This is the higher love displayed in Christ that the world simply does not know or comprehend. But we Christians know and comprehend it, because we know and believe in Christ Jesus. And, when the Holy Spirit sanctifies us, that is, when he calls us to saving faith in Christ, he works the same love of Christ in our hearts. He conforms us to the image of the Son of God. To put it simply, we will love this way because Christ our Savior loved us this way. His love becomes our love.

Compare the readings for today, especially the Old Testament and the Gospel reading. In the Old Testament, Joseph showed love to his enemies: those who threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery. In Joseph’s case, his enemies happened to be his own brothers. When we get to the end of that long narrative that sees Joseph taken from the pit, to Potiphar’s house, to prison, to Pharaoh’s house, and finally, to the management of the grain in Egypt during the famine, we see clearly the hand of God in all of it. We see how God was using the evil Joseph suffered to bring about the salvation of the very brothers who hated him. And Joseph, too, is granted the wisdom to see how God’s hand was working in all of it. Joseph said to his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” Joseph looked back over the story of his life which involved the hatred of his brothers and saw how God was working it all for good. Joseph is such a wonderful type of the life of our Savior himself. Joseph suffered at the hand of his brothers, and God used that suffering to make him the ‘savior’ of his brothers. All of this so wonderfully foreshadows Jesus. Jesus was crucified by his enemies. But that unjust and cruel death was the means by which God brought about the salvation of the world.

The whole Bible is God’s word. But the New Testament is better than the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, we pray for our enemies’ destruction (and indeed, there is nothing wrong with a prayer for God to bring his justice to bear in the world!). But in the New Testament, we pray for our enemies’ conversion. We want God to bring even those who hate us to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We want to share heaven with those who persecute us. When God calls us to suffer at the hand of our enemies we can even rejoice, knowing that our Father in heaven will use the suffering to show the love of Christ to our enemies. We forgive those who hate us in the glad confidence that we too were once the enemies of God—we too were once those poor, miserable sinners for whom Christ died. We remember that the love of our Savior is a love shown precisely to the unworthy and the undeserving. And when we do as Jesus has done, it becomes clear that the Gospel has had its way with us. God grant it for Jesus’ sake!