Loving Your Enemy Is Not a Figure of Speech

I am going to write something today that I expect some people will find uncomfortable. I am writing it anyway, because I think it is true, and because the moment we are in is exactly the moment it needs to be said.

Over a thousand civilians have been killed in Iran in the last two weeks. Among them, families in residential buildings. A girl killed by shrapnel in Kuwait. Children counted in the casualty figures in Lebanon. Alongside this, Israeli families have spent nights in shelters. Nine people killed in Beit Shemesh. US service members dead across the region. Real people. Real deaths. Real grief on all sides.

I have been watching the responses from Christians online. And what I have noticed, and this is the uncomfortable part, is that many of us are grieving selectively. Some are deeply moved by the Israeli casualties and largely unmoved by the Iranian civilian deaths. Others are the opposite. Very few are holding both with the same weight.

I understand why. Tribalism is deeply human. Our sympathies track our alliances, our politics, our histories. It is natural. But I am not sure it is Christian. And I think the Sermon on the Mount, specifically one verse in it, is asking something of us that our tribal instincts would rather not hear.

The Most Uncomfortable Verse in the Sermon

Jesus said this to people living under Roman occupation. Real enemies. Not hypothetical ones. People whose soldiers were stationed in their towns, who could compel them into forced labour, who had crucified insurrectionists on public roads as a deterrent. When He said love your enemies, He was not speaking to people who would have to imagine who their enemies might be. They knew exactly who their enemies were. And He said: love them. Pray for them.

That is a direct, literal instruction. It is not a figure of speech. It is not aspirational language that softens into something manageable when you apply a little hermeneutic pressure. It is a command that becomes more impossible seeming the more specific it gets, and Jesus seems to want it to be specific. Not: have warm feelings toward your enemies in the abstract. Pray for those who persecute you. By name, presumably. With your actual words. As a real practice.

What This Does Not Mean

I want to say clearly what loving your enemy does not mean, because this passage has sometimes been weaponized to silence legitimate criticism or to demand passivity in the face of injustice.

Loving your enemy does not mean believing that what they do is acceptable. Jesus condemned injustice constantly and without apology. He drove money changers out of the temple. He called Herod a fox. He told the truth about the Pharisees with a directness that was not gentle.

Loving your enemy does not mean agreeing with them, excusing them, or declining to hold them accountable. It means refusing to stop seeing them as human. It means being unwilling to dehumanize them, to celebrate their suffering, to treat their deaths as statistics while treating our side's deaths as tragedies. It means praying for them, which includes praying for their repentance, their change, their encounter with the God who loves them too.

It is a high and difficult standard. Jesus knew it was. That is why He said it so explicitly.

The Image of God in Every Face

The theological foundation underneath this command is Genesis 1. Every person is made in the image of God. The Iranian civilian. The Israeli soldier. The Lebanese child. The IRGC commander. The aid worker. Every single one of them carries the image of the God who made them, and that image does not expire because of which side of a geopolitical conflict they were born on.

When Jesus says God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, He is making a theological point: God does not operate the way our tribal instincts do. He does not restrict His care to people who deserve it, or to people on the right side, or to people who share our politics. He causes the sun to rise on all of them. And the standard He is setting for His followers is: be like that. Be the person whose grief and prayer and care is not rationed by nationality or alliance.

That is a genuinely countercultural thing in a moment when every media outlet and social media algorithm is working hard to make your sympathies tribal. The Kingdom demand is the opposite of the algorithmic demand. It is: can you mourn the Iranian family and the Israeli family in the same breath? Can you pray for the US service member and the IRGC soldier in the same prayer?

That is not a both sides ism that flattens moral distinctions. It is a refusal to let any human being become invisible to you because of their nationality.

What This Does to Your Heart

Here is the practical reality about this command. You cannot actually do it without the Spirit is help. The natural human heart does not love its enemies. It defends itself against them, resents them, fears them, or dehumanizes them as a form of self protection. The capacity to love across those boundaries is not a moral achievement. It is a supernatural one.

Which is why Jesus connects it to being children of your Father in heaven. This is what family resemblance looks like in the Kingdom. Not loving people who are like you and easy to love. Loving across the lines that human nature wants to draw. Doing it because God does it, and you are His child, and children take after their parents.

Asking the Spirit to produce this in you is not naive. It is exactly the right prayer for a moment when the world is tribal instincts are being maximally activated.

The Witness This Produces

I want to close with something hopeful, because this post has asked a hard thing and I do not want to leave you only with the weight of it.

When Christians grieve across tribal lines, mourning the Iranian dead and the Israeli dead in the same breath, praying for enemies as genuinely as they pray for friends, it is one of the most distinctive and striking things the watching world can see. It does not look like politics. It does not look like tribalism. It looks like something that has no adequate explanation except that the person has been genuinely changed by a God who loves without limit.

That witness is not small. In a moment when everything is being sorted into tribes and every death is being used to score points, a community that refuses that sorting is doing something genuinely prophetic. It is showing what the Kingdom looks like when it is actually functioning.

Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Jesus was not speaking metaphorically. And He was not asking for anything He had not already given first.