Wednesday
Wednesday
The Six Antitheses
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies.
Matthew 5:43–44
We saw yesterday that what Jesus was contradicting in the six antitheses of Matthew 5 was not Scripture but tradition. All six antitheses are variations on the same theme. Because the scribes and Pharisees found the law burdensome, they tried to reduce its challenge by making its demands less demanding and its permissions more permissive. In this way they made the law more manageable. Let’s take the fifth and sixth antitheses as our examples.
Here is the fifth: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person” (v. 38). An eye for an eye was an instruction to the judges of Israel. It expressed the lex talionis, the principle of an exact retribution as a maximum sentence. But the scribes and Pharisees extended it from the law courts (where it belonged) to the realm of personal relationships (to which it did not belong). They used it to justify revenge, which the law explicitly forbade.
Now the sixth antithesis: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies” (vv. 43–44). The scribes’ quotation was a scandalous perversion of Scripture, for it added to the command to love our neighbor a corresponding command to hate our enemy, which is not in the Old Testament text. The teachers of the law asked themselves who their neighbor was whom they were obliged to love. Why, of course, they replied to themselves, their neighbor was their kith and kin in race and religion. So if they were required to love only their neighbor, it was tantamount to giving them permission to hate their enemy. But Jesus roundly condemned this casuistry. Our neighbor in the vocabulary of God, he insisted, includes our enemy.
If we love only those who love us, we are no better than unbelievers. If we love our enemies, however, it will be apparent that we are children of our heavenly Father, since his love is indiscriminate, giving rain and sunshine to all people alike. Alfred Plummer summed up the options: To return evil for good is devilish. To return good for good is human. To return good for evil is divine.
For further reading: Matthew 5:43–48