Jesus tells us to love our enemies. He doesn’t mean a hypothetical imagined enemy either. When Jesus said ‘love your enemies’, everyone listening in could identify an enemy in the Roman occupation of Israel. So on the surface, this teaching goes against all reason. It is a love that goes beyond common sense. This teaching reflects the love revealed at the Cross, and this goes against our instincts of self-preservation which we have all been enculturated to believe. We are trained to operate within the logic of the myth of redemptive violence, which assumes that violence solves problems. Jesus enters into our binary world of retributive violence or inaction and asks his followers to consider third-way creative responses. Jesus wants his disciples to go further than the law which only tried to minimize and restrain retributive violence (Eg. An eye for an eye) by overcoming evil with good and loving those who are not like us. To live out this teaching is impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit. We cannot will our way or easily make ourselves love our enemies. We can only love our enemies when we have been deeply loved by God. We can only love our enemies when we realize that “while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son”. (Rom 5:10)

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