We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Distinctive Mark of Jesus Followers
Image by Rob Hayes via Fickr
Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies was understandably shocking to his original audience—just as it is to us today. Jesus expected much, which is why, after telling his audience to love their enemies he added that if we only love those who love us and do good those who do good to us, we’re doing nothing more than what everyone naturally does (Luke 6:32-33). But his followers are to be set apart by the radically different way of love. The distinct mark of the reign of God is that God’s people love and do good to people who don’t love them and don’t treat them well—indeed, to people who hate them, mistreat them, and even threaten them and their loved ones.
To drive home the importance of this, Jesus says that if we love even our enemies, “then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” The parallel in Matthew has Jesus saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Just as God is indiscriminately kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, and just as the Father causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall indiscriminately on the evil and the good, so followers of Jesus are to be distinguished by our ability to love indiscriminately. It makes no difference whether the person is friend or foe. And this, Jesus emphasizes, is the condition for our receiving a Kingdom reward and for our becoming “children of your Father in Heaven.” Our willingness to go against our nature and love and serve enemies rather than resort to violence against them is the telltale sign that we are participants in the Kingdom of God.
Notice that there are no exception clauses found anywhere in the New Testament’s teaching about loving and doing good to enemies. Indeed, Jesus’ emphasis on the indiscriminate nature of love rules out any possible exceptions. The sun doesn’t decide on whom it will and will not shine. The rain doesn’t decide on whom it will and will not fall. So too, Kingdom people are forbidden to decide who will and will not receive the love and good deeds we’re commanded to give.
(This is an excerpt from Myth of a Christian Religion, pages 99-100.)
Category: General
Tags: Enemy Love, Jesus, Kingdom Living, Love, Love Your Enemies, Myth of a Christian Religion, Non-Violence
Topics: Following Jesus
Related Reading
Which of the Miracles of Jesus Can Humans Do? (podcast)
Greg is asked about the miracles of Jesus, specifically which miracles do we have the potential to perform. He also gives a nod to the band Theocracy. Episode 74 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0074.mp3
Living Jesus’ Prayer for Forgiveness
Luke 23:34: Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Could anything be more shocking and yet more beautiful than this prayer? After being whipped, beaten, crowned with thorns, repeatedly mocked, spit upon, sneered at, and pierced with spikes through his wrists and ankles, while slowly suffocating as he…
Jesus, the Word of God
“[T]he standing message of the Fathers to the Church Universal,” writes Georges Florovsky, was that “Christ Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures both the climax and the knot of the Bible.”[1] It was also unquestionably one of the most foundational theological assumptions of Luther and Calvin as well as other Reformers. Hence,…
Repent! … From the Sin of Religion
People often think that being Christian is about “being religious,” but loving others in the way that Christ instructs us is about as far removed from religion as anything could be. Religion, as I use the term, is a system of beliefs and behaviors one embraces as a means of getting life—whether this be feeling…
Jesus Repudiates OT Commands on Oath-Taking: A Response to Paul Copan (#9)
In his critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Paul Copan argues that “Boyd pushes too hard to make Jesus’ teaching appear more revolutionary than it really is” [italics original]. Whereas I argue that Jesus repudiates aspects of the Old Testament (OT), Copan argues that Jesus merely repudiates wrong applications of the OT, not…
Speaking of “the Poor”
D. L. Mayfield wrote this guest post on Love is What You Do titled The Language of Poverty. How do we think of and interact with “the poor” on a daily basis? Here’s some good insights should impact our lives as Kingdom people. From the article: Words like “the poor” mean something. They are rich,…