2. Active love (43–48)
A Christian’s righteousness: non-retaliation and active love
(Matthew 5:38–48)
The two final antitheses bring us to the highest point of the Sermon on the Mount, for which it is both most admired and most resented, namely the attitude of total love which Christ calls us to show towards one who is evil (39) and our enemies (44). Nowhere is the challenge of the Sermon greater. Nowhere is the distinctness of the Christian counter-culture more obvious. Nowhere is our need of the power of the Holy Spirit (whose first fruit is love) more compelling.
1. Passive non-retaliation (38–42)
The excerpt from the oral teaching of the rabbis which Jesus quoted comes straight out of the Mosaic law. As we consider it, we need to remember that the law of Moses was a civil as well as a moral code. For example, Exodus 20 contains the ten commandments (the distillation of the moral law). Exodus 21 to 23, on the other hand, contain a series of ‘ordinances’ in which the standards of the ten commandments are applied to the young nation’s life. A wide variety of ‘case-laws’ is given, with a particular emphasis on damage to person and property. It is in the course of this legislation that these words occur: ‘When men strive together … if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’
The context makes it clear beyond question that this was an instruction to the judges of Israel. Indeed, they are mentioned in Deuteronomy 19:17, 18. It expressed the lex talionis, the principle of an exact retribution, whose purpose was both to lay the foundation of justice, specifying the punishment which a wrongdoer deserved, and to limit the compensation of his victim to an exact equivalent and no more. It thus had the double effect of defining justice and restraining revenge. It also prohibited the taking of the law into one’s own hands by the ghastly vengeance of the family feud.
Similarly, in Islamic law the lex talionis specified the maximum punishment allowable. It was administered literally (and still is in e.g. Saudi Arabia) unless the wounded person waived the penalty or his heirs (in a case of murder) demanded blood-money instead.
It is almost certain that by the time of Jesus literal retaliation for damage had been replaced in Jewish legal practice by money penalties or ‘damages’. Indeed there is evidence of this much earlier. The verses immediately following the lex talionis in Exodus enact that if a man strikes his slave so as to destroy his eye or knock out his tooth, instead of losing his own eye or tooth (which he would deserve but which would be no compensation to the disabled slave), he must lose his slave: ‘He shall let the slave go free for the eye’s (or tooth’s) sake.’ We may be quite sure that in other cases too this penalty was not physically exacted, except in the case of murder (‘life for life’); it was commuted to a payment of damages.
But the scribes and Pharisees evidently extended this principle of just retribution from the law courts (where it belongs) to the realm of personal relationships (where it does not belong). They tried to use it to justify personal revenge, although the law explicitly forbade this: ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people.’ Thus, ‘This excellent, if stern, principle of judicial retribution was being utilized as an excuse for the very thing it was instituted to abolish, namely personal revenge.’
In his reply Jesus did not contradict the principle of retribution, for it is a true and just principle. Later in the Sermon he himself stated it in the form: ‘Judge not, that you be not judged’ (7:1), and all his teaching about the terrible reality of divine judgment on the last day rests upon the same foundation principle. What Jesus affirmed in the antithesis was rather that this principle, though it pertains to the law courts and to the judgment of God, is not applicable to our personal relationships. These are to be based on love, not justice. Our duty to individuals who wrong us is not retaliation, but the acceptance of injustice without revenge or redress: Do not resist one who is evil (39).
But what exactly is the meaning of this call to non-resistance? The Greek verb (anthistēmi) is plain: it is to resist, oppose, withstand or set oneself against someone or something. So whom or what are we forbidden to resist?
Perhaps the other uses of the verb in the New Testament will help to set the context for our thinking. According to its major negative use, we are above all not to resist God, his will, his truth or his authority. We are constantly urged, however, to resist the devil. The apostles Paul, Peter and James all tell us to oppose him who is ‘the evil one’ par excellence, and all the powers of evil at his disposal. So how is it possible that Jesus told us not to resist evil? We cannot possibly interpret his command as an invitation to compromise with sin or Satan. No, the first clue to a correct understanding of his teaching is to recognize that the words tō ponērō (‘the evil’) are here masculine not neuter. What we are forbidden to resist is not evil as such, evil in the abstract, nor ‘the evil one’ meaning the devil, but an evil person, one who is evil (as RSV rightly translates) or ‘the man who wrongs you’ (NEB). Jesus does not deny that he is evil. He asks us neither to pretend that he is other than he is, nor to condone his evil behaviour. What he does not allow is that we retaliate. ‘Do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you’ (GNB).
The four mini-illustrations which follow all apply the principle of Christian non-retaliation, and indicate the lengths to which it must go. They are vivid little cameos drawn from different life-situations. Each introduces a person (in the context a person who in some sense is ‘evil’) who seeks to do us an injury, one by hitting us in the face, another by prosecuting us at law, a third by commandeering our service and a fourth by begging money from us. All have a very modern ring except the third, which sounds a bit archaic. The verb translated forces (angareusei), Persian in origin, was used by Josephus with reference to ‘the compulsory transportation of military baggage’. It could be applied today to any form of service in which we find ourselves conscripts rather than volunteers. In each of the four situations, Jesus said, our Christian duty is so completely to forbear revenge that we even allow the ‘evil’ person to double the injury.
Let it be said at once, albeit to our great discomfort, that there will be occasions when we cannot dodge this demand but must obey it literally. It may seem fantastic that we should be expected to offer our left cheek to someone who has already struck our right, especially when we recall that ‘the striking on the right cheek, the blow with the back of the hand, is still today in the East the insulting blow’ and that Jesus probably had in mind not an ordinary insult but ‘a quite specific insulting blow: the blow given to the disciples of Jesus as heretics’. Yet this is the standard which Jesus asks, and it is the standard which he himself fulfilled. It had been written of him in Old Testament Scripture: ‘I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.’ And in the event first the Jewish police spat on him, blindfolded him and struck him in the face, and then the Roman soldiers followed suit. They crowned him with thorns, clothed him in the imperial purple, invested him with a sceptre of reed, jeered at him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews,’ knelt before him in mock homage, spat in his face and struck him with their hands. And Jesus, with the infinite dignity of self-control and love, held his peace. He demonstrated his total refusal to retaliate by allowing them to continue their cruel mockery until they had finished. Further, before we become too eager to evade the challenge of his teaching and behaviour as mere unpractical idealism, we need to remember that Jesus called his disciples to what Bonhoeffer termed a ‘visible participation in his cross’. This is how Peter put it: ‘Christ … suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps … When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he trusted to him who judges justly.’ In Spurgeon’s arresting phrase, we ‘are to be as the anvil when bad men are the hammers’.
Yes, but an anvil is one thing, a doormat is another. Jesus’ illustrations and personal example depict not the weakling who offers no resistance. He himself challenged the high priest when questioned by him in court. They depict rather the strong man whose control of himself and love for others are so powerful that he rejects absolutely every conceivable form of retaliation. Further, however conscientious we may be in our determination not to sidestep the implications of Jesus’ teaching, we still cannot take the four little cameos with wooden, unimaginative literalism. This is partly because they are given not as detailed regulations but as illustrations of a principle, and partly because they must be seen to uphold the principle they are intended to illustrate. That principle is love, the selfless love of a person who, when injured, refuses to satisfy himself by taking revenge, but studies instead the highest welfare of the other person and of society, and determines his reactions accordingly. He will certainly never hit back, returning evil for evil, for he has been entirely freed from personal animosity. Instead, he seeks to return good for evil. So he is willing to give to the uttermost—his body, his clothing, his service, his money—in so far as these gifts are required by love.
Thus the only limit to the Christian’s generosity will be a limit which love itself may impose. For example the apostle Paul once ‘resisted’ (same Greek word) the apostle Peter to his face. Peter’s behaviour had been wrong, evil. He had withdrawn from fellowship with Gentile brothers and so contradicted the gospel. Did Paul give in to him and let him get away with it? No. He opposed him, publicly rebuking him and denouncing his action. And I think we must defend Paul’s conduct as a true expression of love. For on the one hand there was no personal animosity towards Peter (he did not punch him or insult him or injure him), while on the other there was a strong love for the Gentile Christians Peter had affronted and for the gospel he had denied.
Similarly, Christ’s illustrations are not to be taken as the charter for any unscrupulous tyrant, ruffian, beggar or thug. His purpose was to forbid revenge, not to encourage injustice, dishonesty or vice. How can those who seek as their first priority the extension of God’s righteous rule at the same time contribute to the spread of unrighteousness? True love, caring for both the individual and society, takes action to deter evil and to promote good. And Christ’s command was ‘a precept of love, not folly’. He teaches not the irresponsibility which encourages evil but the forbearance which renounces revenge. Authentic Christian non-resistance is non-retaliation.
The familiar words of the Authorized Version, ‘Resist not evil,’ have been taken by some as the basis for an uncompromising pacifism, as the prohibition of the use of force in any and every situation.
One of the most absurd instances of this is ‘the crazy saint’ whom Luther describes, ‘who let the lice nibble at him and refused to kill any of them on account of this text, maintaining that he had to suffer and could not resist evil’!
A more reputable example, though also an extreme one, was Leo Tolstoy, the distinguished nineteenth-century Russian novelist and social reformer. In What I Believe (1884) he describes how in a time of deep personal perplexity about life’s meaning he was ‘left alone with my heart and the mysterious book’. As he read and re-read the Sermon on the Mount, ‘I suddenly understood what I had not formerly understood’ and what, in his view, the whole church for 1800 years had misunderstood. ‘I understood that Christ says just what he says,’ in particular in his command ‘Resist not evil.’ ‘These words …, understood in their direct meaning, were for me truly a key opening everything else.’ In the second chapter (‘The Command of Non-Resistance’) he interprets Jesus’ words as a prohibition of all physical violence to both persons and institutions. ‘It is impossible at one and the same time to confess Christ as God, the basis of whose teaching is non-resistance to him that is evil, and consciously and calmly to work for the establishment of property, law courts, government and military forces …’ Again, ‘Christ totally forbids the human institution of any law court’ because they resist evil and even return evil for evil. The same principle applies, he says, to the police and the army. When Christ’s commands are at last obeyed ‘all men will be brothers, and everyone will be at peace with others … Then the Kingdom of God will have come.’ When in the last chapter he tries to defend himself against the charge of naivety because ‘enemies will come …, and if you do not fight, they will slaughter you’, he betrays his ingenuous (indeed mistaken) doctrine of human beings as basically rational and amiable. Even ‘the so-called criminals and robbers … love good and hate evil as I do’. And when they come to see, through the truth Christians teach and exhibit, that the non-violent devote their lives to serving others, ‘no man will be found so senseless as to deprive of food or to kill those who serve him’.
One man whom Tolstoy’s writings profoundly influenced was Gandhi. Already as a child he had learnt the doctrine of ahimsa, ‘refraining from harming others’. But then as a young man he read first in London the Baghavad Gita and the Sermon on the Mount (‘It is that Sermon which has endeared Jesus to me’), and then in South Africa Tolstoy’s The kingdom of God is within you. When he returned to India about ten years later, he was determined to put Tolstoy’s ideals into action. Strictly speaking, his policy was neither ‘passive resistance’ (which he regarded as too negative), nor ‘civil disobedience’ (which was too defiant) but satyagraha or ‘truth-force’, the attempt to win his opponents by the power of truth and ‘by the example of suffering willingly endured’. His theory approached very close to anarchy. ‘The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.’ In the perfect state which he envisaged, although the police would exist, they would seldom use force; punishment would end; prisons would be turned into schools; and litigation be replaced by arbitration.
It is impossible not to admire Gandhi’s humility and sincerity of purpose. Yet his policy must be judged unrealistic. He said he would resist the Japanese invaders (if they came) by a peace brigade, but his claim never had to be put to the test. He urged the Jews to offer a non-violent resistance to Hitler, but they did not heed him. In July 1940 he issued an appeal to every Briton for the cessation of hostilities, in which he claimed: ‘I have been practising, with scientific precision, non-violence and its possibilities for an unbroken period of over fifty years. I have applied it in every walk of life—domestic, institutional, economic and political. I know no single case in which it has failed.’ But his appeal fell on deaf ears. Jacques Ellul makes the perceptive comment that ‘an essential factor in Gandhi’s success’ was the people involved. These were on the one hand India, ‘a people shaped by centuries of concern for holiness and the spiritual, … a people … uniquely capable of understanding and accepting his message’ and on the other Britain which ‘officially declared itself a Christian nation’ and ‘could not remain insensible to Gandhi’s preachment of non-violence’. ‘But put Gandhi into the Russia of 1925 or the Germany of 1933. The solution would be simple: after a few days he would be arrested and nothing more would be heard of him.’
Our main disagreement with Tolstoy and Gandhi, however, must not be that their views were unrealistic, but that they were unbiblical. For we cannot take Jesus’ command, ‘Resist not evil,’ as an absolute prohibition of the use of all force (including the police) unless we are prepared to say that the Bible contradicts itself and the apostles misunderstood Jesus. For the New Testament teaches that the state is a divine institution, commissioned (through its executive office-bearers) both to punish the wrongdoer (i.e., to ‘resist one who is evil’ to the point of making him bear the penalty of his evil) and to reward those who do good. This revealed truth may not be twisted, however, to justify the institutionalized violence of an oppressive regime. Far from it. Indeed, the same state—the Roman Empire—which in Romans 13 is termed ‘the servant of God’, wielding his authority, is pictured in Revelation 13 as an ally of the devil wielding his authority. But these two aspects of the state complement one another; they are not contradictory. The fact that the state has been instituted by God does not preserve it from abusing its power and becoming a tool of Satan. Nor does the historical truth that the state has sometimes persecuted good men alter the biblical truth that its real function is to punish bad men. And when the state exercises its God-given authority to punish, it is ‘the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer’.
How does this principle apply to war? No slick or easy answer either for or against war seems possible, although all Christians will surely agree that in its very nature war is brutalizing and horrible. Certainly too the concept of the ‘just war’ developed by Thomas Aquinas, a war whose cause, methods and results must be ‘just’, is difficult to relate to the modern world. Nevertheless, I would want to argue on the one hand that war cannot be absolutely repudiated on the basis of ‘Resist not evil’ any more than police and prisons can, and on the other that its only possible justification (from a biblical viewpoint) would be as a kind of glorified police action. Further, it is of the essence of police action to be discriminate; to arrest specific evildoers in order to bring them to justice. It is because so much modern warfare lacks anything approaching this precision either in defining the evildoers or in punishing the evil that Christian consciences revolt against it. Certainly the indiscriminate horrors of atomic war, engulfing the innocent with the guilty, are enough to condemn it altogether.
The point I have been labouring is that the duties and functions of the state are quite different from those of the individual. The individual’s responsibility towards a wrongdoer was laid down by the apostle Paul at the end of Romans 12: ‘Repay no one evil for evil (surely an echo of “Do not resist one who is evil”), but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all … 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.” No, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head” (i.e. shame him into repentance). Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’ It will be seen that Paul’s prohibition of vengeance is not because retribution is in itself wrong, but because it is the prerogative of God, not man. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord. His purpose is to express his wrath or vengeance now through the law courts (as Paul goes on to write in Romans 13), and finally on the day of judgment.
This difference of God-given function between two ‘servants of God’—the state to punish the evildoer, the individual Christian not to repay evil for evil, but to overcome evil with good—is bound to create a painful tension in all of us, specially because all of us in different degrees are both individuals and citizens of the state, and therefore share in both functions. For example, if my house is burgled one night and I catch the thief, it may well be my duty to sit him down and give him something to eat and drink, while at the same time telephoning the police.
Luther explained this tension by making a helpful distinction between our ‘person’ and our ‘office’. It was part of his teaching about the ‘two kingdoms’ which has, however, been justly criticized. He derived it from the text ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. He saw in these words the existence of both a divine or spiritual realm, ‘the kingdom of Christ’, and a secular or temporal realm, ‘the kingdom of the world’ (or ‘of the emperor’). In the first, which he also called ‘the kingdom of God’s right hand’, the Christian lives as a ‘person’; in the second ‘the kingdom of God’s left hand’, he occupies an ‘office’ of some kind, whether as ‘father’, ‘master’, ‘prince’ or ‘judge’. ‘You must not confuse the two,’ Luther wrote, ‘your person or your office.’
Here is part of his application of this distinction to the command not to resist evil: a Christian ‘lives simultaneously as a Christian toward everyone, personally suffering all sorts of things in the world, and as a secular person, maintaining, using and performing all the functions required by the law of his territory or city …’ ‘A Christian should not resist any evil; but within the limits of his office a secular person should oppose every evil.’ ‘In short, the rule in the kingdom of Christ is the toleration of everything, forgiveness, and the recompense of evil with good. On the other hand, in the realm of the emperor, there should be no tolerance shown towards any injustice, but rather a defence against wrong and a punishment of it, … according to what each one’s office or station may require.’ ‘Christ … is not saying “No one should ever resist evil” for that would completely undermine all rule and authority. But this is what he is saying: “You, you shall not do it”.’
Luther’s clear-cut distinction between the two ‘realms’ was certainly overdrawn. ‘It is difficult to escape the feeling,’ writes Harvey McArthur, ‘that his teaching gave to the secular sphere an autonomy to which it has no rightful claim.’ He went as far as to tell the Christian that in the secular kingdom ‘you do not have to ask Christ about your duty’, for it can be learnt from the emperor. But Scripture does not allow us to set the two kingdoms over against each other in such total contrast, as if the church were Christ’s sphere ruled by love and the state the emperor’s ruled by justice. For Jesus Christ has universal authority, and no sphere may be excluded from his rule. Further, the state’s administration of justice needs to be tempered with love, while in the church love has sometimes to be expressed in terms of discipline. Jesus himself spoke of the painful necessity of excommunicating an obstinate and unrepentant offender.
Nevertheless, I think Luther’s distinction between ‘person’ and ‘office’, or, as we might say, between individual and institution, holds. The Christian is to be wholly free from revenge, not only in action, but in his heart as well; as an office-bearer in either state or church, however, he may find himself entrusted with authority from God to resist evil and to punish it.
To sum up the teaching of this antithesis, Jesus was not prohibiting the administration of justice, but rather forbidding us to take the law into our own hands. ‘An eye for an eye’ is a principle of justice belonging to courts of law. In personal life we must be rid not only of all retaliation in word and deed, but of all animosity of spirit. We can and must commit our cause to the good and righteous judge, as Jesus himself did, but it is not for us to seek or to desire any personal revenge. We must not repay injury but suffer it, and so overcome evil with good.
So the command of Jesus not to resist evil should not properly be used to justify either temperamental weakness or moral compromise or political anarchy or even total pacifism. Instead, what Jesus here demands of all his followers is a personal attitude to evildoers which is prompted by mercy not justice, which renounces retaliation so completely as to risk further costly suffering, which is governed never by the desire to cause them harm but always by the determination to serve their highest good.
I do not know anybody who has expressed this in more relevant modern terms than Martin Luther King, who had learnt as much from Gandhi as Gandhi had learnt from Tolstoy, although I think he understood Jesus’ teaching better than either. There can be no doubt of the unjust sufferings which Luther King had to endure. Dr Benjamin Mays listed them at his funeral: ‘If any man knew the meaning of suffering, King knew. House bombed; living day by day for thirteen years under constant threats of death; maliciously accused of being a Communist; falsely accused of being insincere …; stabbed by a member of his own race; slugged in a hotel lobby; jailed over twenty times; occasionally deeply hurt because friends betrayed him—and yet this man had no bitterness in his heart, no rancour in his soul, no revenge in his mind; and he went up and down the length and breadth of this world preaching non-violence and the redemptive power of love.’
One of his most moving sermons, based on Matthew 5:43–45, was entitled ‘Loving your enemies’ and was written in a Georgia gaol. Wrestling with the questions why and how Christians are to love, he described how ‘hate multiplies hate … in a descending spiral of violence’ and is ‘just as injurious to the person who hates’ as to his victim. But above all ‘love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend’ for it has ‘creative’ and ‘redemptive’ power. He went on to apply his theme to the racial crisis in the United States. For over three centuries American Negroes had suffered oppression, frustration and discrimination. But Luther King and his friends were determined to ‘meet hate with love’. Then they would win both freedom and their oppressors, ‘and our victory will be a double victory’.
2. Active love (43–48)
We have already seen how blatant a perversion of the law is the instruction, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy,’ because of what it omits from the commandment and adds to it. It deliberately narrows both the standard of love (leaving out the crucial words ‘as yourself’, which pitch the standard very high) and its objects (qualifying the category of ‘neighbour’ by specifically excluding enemies from it and adding the command to hate them instead). I call the perversion ‘blatant’ because it is totally lacking in justification, and yet the rabbis would have defended it as a legitimate interpretation. They seized on the immediate context of the inconvenient command to love the neighbour, pointing out that Leviticus 19 is addressed ‘to all the congregation of the people of Israel’. It gives instructions to Israelites on their duties to their own parents, and more widely to their ‘neighbour’ and their ‘brother’. They were not to oppress or rob him, whatever his social status might be. ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart … You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (vv. 17, 18).
It was easy enough for ethical casuists (consciously or unconsciously anxious to ease the burden of this command) to twist it to their own convenience. ‘My neighbour’, they argued, ‘is one of my own people, a fellow Jew, my own kith and kin, who belongs to my race and my religion. The law says nothing about strangers or enemies. So, since the command is to love only my neighbour, it must be taken as a permission, even an injunction, to hate my enemy. For he is not my neighbour that I should love him.’ The reasoning is rational enough to convince those who wanted to be convinced, and to confirm them in their own racial prejudice. But it is a rationalization, and a specious one at that. They evidently ignored the instruction earlier in the same chapter to leave the gleanings of field and vineyard ‘for the poor and the sojourner’, who was not a Jew but a resident alien, and the unequivocal statement against racial discrimination at the end of the chapter: ‘the stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself’ (34). Similarly, ‘There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.’
They also turned a blind eye to other commandments which regulated their conduct towards their enemies. For example, ‘If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it, you shall help him to lift it up.’ Almost identical instruction was given regarding a brother’s ox or ass, indicating that love’s requirement was the same whether the beasts belonged to a ‘brother’ or to an ‘enemy’. The rabbis must also have known very well the teaching of the book of Proverbs, which the apostle Paul was later to quote as an illustration of overcoming rather than avenging evil: ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.’
It is quite true that the scribes and Pharisees may have adduced as biblical warrant to hate their enemies either the Israelite wars against the Canaanites or the imprecatory psalms. But if so they misunderstood both these wars and these psalms. The Canaanites are known from modern near eastern studies to have been utterly corrupt in religion and culture. So nauseating were their abominable practices that the land itself is described as having ‘vomited them out’. Indeed if Israel were to follow their customs, she would share their fate. ‘The wars of Israel’, wrote Bonhoeffer, ‘were the only “holy wars” in history, for they were the wars of God against the world of idols. It is not this enmity which Jesus condemns, for then he would have condemned the whole history of God’s dealings with his people. On the contrary, he affirms the old covenant. But from now on there will be no more wars of faith.’
As for the imprecatory psalms, in them the psalmist speaks not with any personal animosity but as a representative of God’s chosen people Israel, regards the wicked as the enemies of God, counts them his own enemies only because he has completely identified himself with the cause of God, hates them because he loves God, and is so confident that this ‘hatred’ is ‘perfect hatred’ that he calls upon God in the next breath to search him and know his heart, to try him and know his thoughts, in order to see if there is any wickedness in him. That we cannot easily aspire to this is an indication not of our spirituality but of our lack of it, not of our superior love for men but of our inferior love for God, indeed of our inability to hate the wicked with a hatred that is ‘perfect’ and not ‘personal’.
The truth is that evil men should be the object simultaneously of our ‘love’ and of our ‘hatred’, as they are simultaneously the objects of God’s (although his ‘hatred’ is expressed as his ‘wrath’). To ‘love’ them is ardently to desire that they will repent and believe, and so be saved. To ‘hate’ them is to desire with equal ardour that, if they stubbornly refuse to repent and believe, they will incur God’s judgment. Have you never prayed for the salvation of wicked men (e.g., who blaspheme God or exploit their fellow humans for profit as if they were animals), and gone on to pray that if they refuse God’s salvation, then God’s judgment will fall upon them? I have. It is a natural expression of our belief in God, that he is the God both of salvation and of judgment, and that we desire his perfect will to be done.
So there is such a thing as perfect hatred, just as there is such a thing as righteous anger. But it is a hatred for God’s enemies, not our own enemies. It is entirely free of all spite, rancour and vindictiveness, and is fired only by love for God’s honour and glory. It finds expression now in the prayer of the martyrs who have been killed for the word of God and for their witness. And it will be expressed on the last day by the whole company of God’s redeemed people who, seeing God’s judgment come upon the wicked, will concur in its perfect justice and will say in unison, ‘Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just … Amen. Hallelujah!’
It will surely now be conceded that such pure ‘hatred’ of evil and of evil men, unmixed with any taint of personal malice, gave the rabbis no possible justification for changing God’s command to love our neighbour into a permission also to hate those who hate us, our personal enemies. The words ‘and hate your enemy’ were a ‘parasitical growth’ upon God’s law; they had no business there. God did not teach his people a double standard of morality, one for a neighbour and another for an enemy.
So Jesus contradicted their addition as a gross distortion of the law: But I say to you, Love your enemies (44). For our neighbour, as he later illustrated so plainly in the parable of the good Samaritan, is not necessarily a member of our own race, rank or religion. He may not even have any connection with us. He may be our enemy, who is after us with a knife or a gun. Our ‘neighbour’ in the vocabulary of God includes our enemy. What constitutes him our neighbour is simply that he is a fellow human being in need, whose need we know and are in a position in some measure to relieve.
What, then, is our duty to our neighbour, whether he be friend or foe? We are to love him. Moreover, if we add the clauses in Luke’s account of the Sermon, our love for him will be expressed in our deeds, our words and our prayers. First, our deeds. ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you … Love your enemies, and do good …’ ‘Do-gooders’ are despised in today’s world, and, to be sure, if philanthropy is self-conscious and patronizing, it is not what Jesus meant by ‘doing good’. The point he is making is that true love is not sentiment so much as service—practical, humble, sacrificial service. As Dostoyevsky put it somewhere, ‘Love in action is much more terrible than love in dreams.’ Our enemy is seeking our harm; we must seek his good. For this is how God has treated us. It is ‘while we were enemies’ that Christ died for us to reconcile us to God. If he gave himself for his enemies, we must give ourselves for ours.
Words can also express our love, however, both words addressed to our enemies themselves and words addressed to God on their behalf. ‘Bless those who curse you.’ If they call down disaster and catastrophe upon our heads, expressing in words their wish for our downfall, we must retaliate by calling down heaven’s blessing upon them, declaring in words that we wish them nothing but good. Finally, we direct our words to God. Both evangelists record this command of Jesus: ‘Pray for those who persecute (or abuse) you.’ Chrysostom saw this responsibility to pray for our enemies as ‘the very highest summit of self-control’. Indeed, looking back over the requirements of these last two antitheses, he traces nine ascending steps, with intercession as the topmost one. First, we are not to take any evil initiative ourselves. Secondly, we are not to avenge another’s evil. Thirdly, we are to be quiet, and fourthly, to suffer wrongfully. Fifthly, we are to surrender to the evildoer even more than he demands. Sixthly, we are not to hate him, but (steps 7 and 8) to love him and do him good. As our ninth duty, we are ‘to entreat God Himself on his behalf’.
Modern commentators also have seen such intercession as the summit of Christian love. ‘This is the supreme command,’ wrote Bonhoeffer. ‘Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God.’ Moreover, if intercessory prayer is an expression of what love we have, it is a means to increase our love as well. It is impossible to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him without discovering that our love for him grows and matures. We must not, therefore, wait before praying for an enemy until we feel some love for him in our heart. We must begin to pray for him before we are conscious of loving him, and we shall find our love break first into bud, then into blossom. Jesus seems to have prayed for his tormentors actually while the iron spikes were being driven through his hands and feet; indeed the imperfect tense suggests that he kept praying, kept repeating his entreaty ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’. If the cruel torture of crucifixion could not silence our Lord’s prayer for his enemies, what pain, pride, prejudice or sloth could justify the silencing of ours?
I find I am quoting Bonhoeffer in this chapter more than any other commentator. I suppose the reason is that although he wrote his exposition before the outbreak of war, he could see where Nazism was leading, and we know to what fate his Christian testimony against it brought him in the end. He quoted a certain A. F. C. Villmar of 1880, but his words sound almost prophetic of Bonhoeffer’s own day: ‘This commandment, that we should love our enemies and forgo revenge, will grow even more urgent in the holy struggle which lies before us … The Christians will be hounded from place to place, subjected to physical assault, maltreatment and death of every kind. We are approaching an age of wide-spread persecution … Soon the time will come when we shall pray … It will be a prayer of earnest love for these very sons of perdition who stand around and gaze at us with eyes aflame with hatred, and who have perhaps already raised their hands to kill us … Yes, the Church which is really waiting for its Lord, and which discerns the signs of the times of decision, must fling itself with its utmost power and with the panoply of its holy life, into this prayer of love.’
Having indicated that our love for our enemies will express itself in deeds, words and prayers, Jesus goes on to declare that only then shall we prove conclusively whose sons we are, for only then shall we be exhibiting a love like the love of our heavenly Father’s. For he makes his sun rise (notice, in passing, to whom the sun belongs!) on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (45). Divine love is indiscriminate love, shown equally to good men and bad. The theologians (following Calvin) call this God’s ‘common grace’. It is not ‘saving grace’, enabling sinners to repent, believe and be saved; but grace shown to all mankind, the penitent and the impenitent, believers and unbelievers alike. This common grace of God is expressed, then, not in the gift of salvation but in the gifts of creation, and not least in the blessings of rain and sunshine, without which we could not eat and life on the planet could not continue. This, then, is to be the standard of Christian love. We are to love like God, not men.
For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Or what credit is that to you? ‘Even sinners love those who love them.’ Fallen man is not incapable of loving. The doctrine of total depravity does not mean (and has never meant) that original sin has rendered men incapable of doing anything good at all, but rather that every good they do is tainted to some degree by evil. Unredeemed sinners can love. Parental love, filial love, conjugal love, the love of friends—all these, as we know very well, are the regular experience of men and women outside Christ. Even the tax collectors (the petty customs officials who because of their extortion had a reputation for greed) love those who love them. Even the Gentiles (those ‘dogs’, as the Jews called them, those outsiders who loathed the Jews and would look the other way when they passed one in the street), even they salute each other. None of this is in dispute.
But all human love, even the highest, the noblest and the best, is contaminated to some degree by the impurities of self-interest. We Christians are specifically called to love our enemies (in which love there is no self-interest), and this is impossible without the supernatural grace of God. If we love only those who love us, we are no better than swindlers. If we greet only our brothers and sisters, our fellow Christians, we are no better than pagans; they too greet one another. The question Jesus asked is: What more are you doing than others? (47). This simple word more is the quintessence of what he is saying. It is not enough for Christians to resemble non-Christians; our calling is to outstrip them in virtue. Our righteousness is to exceed (perisseusē … pleion) that of the Pharisees (20) and our love is to surpass, to be more than (perisson) that of the Gentiles (47). Bonhoeffer puts it well: ‘What makes the Christian different from other men is the “peculiar”, the perisson, the “extraordinary”, the “unusual”, that which is not “a matter of course”… It is “the more”, the “beyond-all-that”. The natural is to auto (one and the same) for heathen and Christian, the distinctive quality of the Christian life begins with the perisson … For him (sc. Jesus) the hallmark of the Christian is the “extraordinary”.’
And what is this perisson, this ‘plus’ or ‘extra’ which Christians must display? Bonhoeffer’s reply was: ‘It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, who went patiently and obediently to the cross … The cross is the differential of the Christian religion.’ What he writes is true. Yet, to be more precise, the way Jesus put it was to say that this ‘super-love’ is not the love of men, but the love of God, which in common grace gives sun and rain to the wicked. So you, therefore (the ‘you’ is emphatic, distinguishing Christians from non-Christians), must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (48). The concept that God’s people must imitate God rather than men is not new. The book of Leviticus repeated some five times as a refrain the command, ‘I am the Lord your God;… you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.’ Yet here Christ’s call to us is not to be ‘holy’ but to be ‘perfect’.
Some holiness teachers have built upon this verse great dreams of the possibility of reaching in this life a state of sinless perfection. But the words of Jesus cannot be pressed into meaning this without causing discord in the Sermon. For he has already indicated in the beatitudes that a hunger and thirst after righteousness is a perpetual characteristic of his disciples, and in the next chapter he will teach us to pray constantly, ‘Forgive us our debts.’ Both the hunger for righteousness and the prayer for forgiveness, being continuous, are clear indications that Jesus did not expect his followers to become morally perfect in this life. The context shows that the ‘perfection’ he means relates to love, that perfect love of God which is shown even to those who do not return it. Indeed, scholars tell us that the Aramaic word which Jesus may well have used meant ‘all-embracing’. The parallel verse in Luke’s account of the Sermon confirms this: ‘Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.’ We are called to be perfect in love, that is, to love even our enemies with the merciful, the inclusive love of God.
Christ’s call to us is new not only because it is a command to be ‘perfect’ rather than ‘holy’, but also because of his description of the God we are to imitate. In the Old Testament it was always ‘I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God; you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.’ But now in New Testament days it is not the unique Redeemer of Israel whom we are to follow and obey; it is our Father who is in heaven (45), our heavenly Father (48). And our obedience will come from our hearts as the manifestation of our new nature. For we are the sons of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, and we can demonstrate whose sons we are only when we exhibit the family likeness, only when we become peacemakers as he is (9), only when we love with an all-embracing love like his (45, 48).
The last two antitheses of the series reveal a progression. The first is a negative command: Do not resist one who is evil; the second is positive: Love your enemies and seek their good. The first is a call to passive non-retaliation, the second to active love. As Augustine put it, ‘Many have learned how to offer the other cheek, but do not know how to love him by whom they were struck.’ For we are to go beyond forbearance to service, beyond the refusal to repay evil to the resolve to overcome evil with good. Alfred Plummer summed up the alternatives with admirable simplicity: ‘To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; to return good for evil is divine.’
Throughout his exposition Jesus sets before us alternative models by which he contrasts secular culture and Christian counter-culture. Ingrained in non-Christian culture is the notion of retaliation, both the retaliation of evil and the retaliation of good. The first is obvious, for it means revenge. But the second is sometimes overlooked. Jesus expressed it as ‘doing good to those who do good to you’. So the first says, ‘You do me a bad turn, and I’ll do you a bad turn,’ and the second, ‘You do me a good turn and I’ll do you a good turn,’ or (more colloquially) ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ So retaliation is the way of the world; revenge on the one hand and recompense on the other, paying back injuries and paying back favours. Then we are quits, we are no man’s debtors, we keep even with everybody. It is the device of the proud who cannot bear to be indebted to anybody. It is an attempt to order society by a rough and ready justice which we administer ourselves, so that nobody gets the better of us in any way.
But it will not do in the kingdom of God! Sinners, Gentiles and tax collectors behave that way. It is the highest to which they can rise. But it is not high enough for the citizens of God’s kingdom: What more are you doing than others? Jesus asks (47). So the model he sets before us as an alternative to the world around us is our Father above us. Since he is kind to the evil as well as the good, his children must be too. The life of the old (fallen) humanity is based on rough justice, avenging injuries and returning favours. The life of the new (redeemed) humanity is based on divine love, refusing to take revenge but overcoming evil with good.
Jesus accused the Pharisees of placing two serious restrictions on their love. Of course they believed in love. Everybody believes in love. Yes, but not love for those who had injured them, and not love for those Gentile outsiders either. The spirit of pharisaism is still abroad. It is the spirit of revenge and of racialism. The first says, ‘I’ll love nice harmless people, but I’ll get even with those who wrong me.’ The second says, ‘I’ll love my own kith and kin, but you can’t expect me to love people who have no claim on me.’ In fact Jesus does expect of his followers the very things which others think cannot reasonably be expected of anybody. He calls us to renounce all those convenient restrictions we like to put on love (especially revenge and racialism) and instead to be all-embracing and constructive in our love, like God.
Looking back over all six antitheses, it has become clear what the ‘greater’ righteousness is to which Christians are summoned. It is a deep inward righteousness of the heart where the Holy Spirit has written God’s law. It is new fruit exhibiting the newness of the tree, new life burgeoning from a new nature. So we have no liberty to try to dodge or duck the lofty demands of the law. Law-dodging is a pharisaic hobby; what is characteristic of Christians is a keen appetite for righteousness, hungering and thirsting after it continuously. And this righteousness, whether expressed in purity, honesty or charity, will show to whom we belong. Our Christian calling is to imitate not the world, but the Father. And it is by this imitation of him that the Christian counter-culture becomes visible.