In His sixth, and last, illustration contrasting the false righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees with the true righteousness of God, Jesus contrasts their kind of love with God’s. Nowhere does humanistic, self-centered system of religion differ more from God’s divine standards than in the matter of love. Nowhere is God’s standard so corrupted as in the way the self-righteous scribes and Pharisees viewed themselves in relation to others. Nowhere was it more evident that they lacked the humility, mourning gerberaover their own sin, meekness, yearning for true righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking spirit that are to belong to God’s kingdom citizens.
How we regard those who are hostile to us is the ultimate test of our spiritual health. We can intellectually agree with the concept of love and even profess it, but when confronted with hostility, how do we react? Can we look back this month, or week and truly say that we have shown the love of Christ even to those who were most hostile to us?
We must take care that we neither profess false expectations that everyone will be our friends or that we will not experience hostility. Often when we do the right things we experience such conflict. Jesus certainly did. When we focus on what our actions and what our attitudes must be, and not making excuses based on what someone else has done, then we show ourselves to belong to God’s kingdom.
How can we love those who are hostile to us? Jesus shows us how in looking at 1) The Misinterpretation: Matthew 5:43, 2) The Mandate Matthew 5:44, and 3) The Motive: Matthew 5:45-48
1) The Misinterpretation: Matthew 5:43
Matthew 5:43 [43]"You have heard that it was said, ’You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ (ESV)
That phrase is the only part of the tradition that was adapted from the Old Testament.
Leviticus 19:18 requires that:
Leviticus 19:18 [18]You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (ESV)
This command was often repeated in the New Testament (Matt. 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). Love for others, shown in sympathetic concern and actual care for them, had always been God’s standard for human relations.
As in all the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking here about personal standards of righteousness, not civil law. In the fullest sense an Israelite’s neighbor was anyone in need whom he might come across in his daily living. (See our Lord’s answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” in Luke 10:30–37.)
As in each of the five preceding illustrations, Jesus repeats the essence of the contemporary traditional teaching, in this case the teaching about love. Love, said the ancients, was to be reserved for those you get along with. Enemies were to be hated.
Satan’s perversions of God’s revelation almost always touch on the truth at some point. A little truth makes deception more believable and acceptable. The rabbis and scribes had kept a part of God’s truth about love. In spite of such clear revelation, rabbinic tradition had perverted Old Testament teaching both by what was omitted and by what was added.
A) PERVERSION BY OMISSION
Omitted in the tradition was the phrase “as yourself,” which was a key part of the Leviticus text but could not possibly fit into their scheme of proud self-righteousness. It simply was inconceivable that they should care for any other person as much as they cared for themselves.
Along with that significant omission, tradition had narrowed the meaning of neighbor to include only those people they preferred and approved of-which amounted basically to their own kind. Such obviously profane people as tax-gatherers and ordinary sinners were despised as outcasts and as not being worthy even to be considered Jews.
But even that restriction of neighbor was not narrow enough. The scribes and Pharisees also despised and looked down on the common people. They dismissed those who believed in Jesus by saying:
John 7:48-49 [48]Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? [49]But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed." (ESV)
• Ironically, the proud and arrogant religious leaders who knew, but perverted, the law disdained as “accursed” the common people who they felt did not know it.
• The common kind things we tell children to practice are often the simplest things that we ourselves must remember. If we think of those who we spend time with, is it those who we feel socially comfortable with, or do we reach out to the newcomer, the socially awkward or those who are just not like us?
o Our concept of neighbor must not be restricted to those who are geographically right beside us.
B) PERVERSION BY ADDITION
Rabbinic tradition also perverted the Old Testament teaching about love by adding something to it: hate your enemy. Their addition was even more perverse than their omission, but it was the logical extension of their all-consuming self-interest.
It goes without saying that Gentiles were not considered neighbors.
Quote: A saying of the Pharisees has been discovered that reads, “If a Jew sees a Gentile fallen into the sea, let him by no means lift him out, for it is written, ‘Thou shalt not rise up against the blood of thy neighbor,’ but this man is not thy neighbor.” It is little wonder that the Romans charged Jews with hatred of the human race.
One excuse the Jews may often have made to justify hatred of Gentiles was based on God’s command for their forefathers to drive out the Canaanites, Midianites, Moabites, Ammonites, and other pagan peoples as they conquered and possessed the Promised Land under Joshua (Josh. 3:10; cf. Ex. 33:2; Deut. 7:1; etc.).
• Recall this was a national battle cry directly from God. This was not in terms of individual common relationships.
• Israel’s harsh dealing with those people was entirely as the instrument of God’s judgment. God’s people were never to return evil for evil, cruelty for cruelty, hatred for hatred. The idea that Gentiles, even wicked ones, were to be personally despised and hated originated from the heretical Jews’ own pride and self-righteousness, not from God’s Word.
Quote: “The wars of Israel,” writes Dietrich 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 dealing with His people. On the contrary, He affirms the Old Covenant” (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller [2d rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960], p. 163).
Please turn to Psalm 69
Rabbinic tradition no doubt also tried to justify hatred of enemies on the basis of the imprecatory psalms. David wrote,
Psalm 69:22-24 [22]Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap. [23]Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. [24]Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. (ESV)
• Such words did not represent David’s personal vendetta but his concern for God’s holiness and justice to be executed on those who despised the Lord’s glorious name and persecuted the Lord’s people.
• It is one thing to defend the honor and glory of God by seeking the defeat of His detracting enemies, but quite another to hate people personally as our own enemies. Our attitude toward even the worst pagans or heretics is to love them and pray that they will turn to God and be saved.
The scribes and Pharisees, knew nothing either of righteous indignation or righteous love. Their only indignation was that of personal hatred, and their only love was that of self-esteem.
We have seen: 1) The Misinterpretation: Matthew 5:43, and now:
2) The Mandate: Matthew 5:44
Matthew 5:44 [44]But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,. (ESV)
In five ascending statements Jesus proclaims the kind of love that God has always required of His people and that must characterize everyone who goes by the name of the Lord.
A) LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
But I say to you, love your enemies. (5:44a)
Here is the most powerful teaching in Scripture about the meaning of love. The love that God commands of His people is love so great that it even embraces enemies.
Quote: William Hendriksen comments,
All around him were those walls and fences. He came for the very purpose of bursting those barriers, so that love-pure, warm, divine, infinite-would be able to flow straight down from the heart of God, hence from his own marvelous heart, into the hearts of men. His love overleaped all the boundaries of race, nationality, party, age, sex. …
When he said, “I tell you, love your enemies,” he must have startled his audience, for he was saying something that probably never before had been said so succinctly, positively, and forcefully. (The Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973], p. 313)
The scribes and Pharisees were proud, prejudiced, judgmental, spiteful, hateful, vengeful men who masqueraded as the custodians of God’s law and the spiritual leaders of Israel. To them, Jesus’ command to love your enemies must have seemed naive and foolish in the extreme. They not only felt they had the right but the duty to hate their enemies. Not to hate those who obviously deserve to be hated would be a breach of righteousness.
Jesus again sets His divine standard against the perverted human standards of that heretical Jewish tradition and reinforces it with the emphatic I. In placing what He said above what tradition said, He placed His word on a par with Scripture-as His hearers well understood. Jesus not only placed emphasis on what was said but on who said it. It was not just that His teaching was the standard of truth, but that He Himself was the standard of truth.
• Paraphrase: “Your great rabbis, scribes, and scholars have taught you to love only those of your own preference and to hate your enemies, ” Jesus was saying. “But by My own authority, I declare that they are false teachers and have perverted God’s revealed truth. The divine truth is My truth, which is that you shall love your enemies.”
The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is not primarily to answer the lawyer’s question, “And who is my neighbor?” though it does that, but to show that Gods’ requirement is for us to be neighbors to anyone who needs our help (Luke 10:29, 36–37).
The Greek language has four different terms that are usually translated “love.” Philia is brotherly love and the love of friendship; storgç is the love of family; and erôs is desiring, romantic, sexual love. But the love of which Jesus speaks here, and which is most spoken of in the New Testament, is agapç, the love that seeks and works to meet another’s highest welfare.
Quote: The commentator R. C. H. Lenski writes:
[Love] indeed, sees all the hatefulness and the wickedness of the enemy, feels his stabs and his blows, may even have something to do toward warding them off; but all this simply fills the loving heart with the one desire and aim, to free its enemy from his hate, to rescue him from his sin, and thus to save his soul. Mere affection is often blind, but even then it thinks that it sees something attractive in the one toward whom it goes out; the higher love may see nothing attractive in the one so loved, … its inner motive is simply to bestow true blessing on the one loved, to do him the highest good. … I cannot like a low, mean criminal who may have robbed me and threatened my life; I cannot like a false, lying, slanderous fellow who, perhaps, has vilified me again and again; but I can by the grace of Jesus Christ love them all, see what is wrong with them, desire and work to do them only good, most of all to free them from their vicious ways. (The Interpretation of St. Matthew’s Gospel [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1964], p. 247)
The human tendency is to base love on the desirability of the object of our love. We love people who are attractive, hobbies that are enjoyable, a house or a car because it looks nice and pleases us, and so on. But true love is need-oriented. The Good Samaritan demonstrated great love because he sacrificed his own convenience, safety, and resources to meet another’s desperate need.
• Once again, we must not just come to the realization of this truth but stop and think about where we have recently sacrificed our own convenience, safety, and resources to meet another’s desperate need.
• Teaching for our children and for ourselves must take the intellection to the practical. We show what we truly believe.
B) PRAY FOR YOUR PERSECUTORS
and pray for those who persecute you. (5:44b)
Jesus taught that every disciple who makes their faith known is going to pay some price for it, and that we are to pray for those who exact that price from us. Loving enemies is not natural and is sometimes difficult even for those who belong to God and have His love within them.
The best way to have the right attitude, the agapç love attitude, toward those who persecute us is to bring them before the Lord in prayer. We may sense their wickedness, their unfairness, their ungodliness, and their hatred for us, and in light of those things we could not possibly love them for what they are. We must love them because of who they are-sinners fallen from the image of God and in need of God’s forgiveness and grace, just as we were sinners in need of His forgiveness and grace before He saved us. We are to pray for them that they will, as we have done, seek His forgiveness and grace.
Our persecutors may not always be unbelievers. Christians can cause other Christians great trouble, and the first step toward healing those broken relationships is also prayer. Whoever persecutes us, in whatever way and in whatever degree, should be on our prayer list. Talking to God about others can begin to knit the petitioner’s heart with the heart of God.
Quote: Chrysostom said that prayer is the very highest summit of self-control and that we have most brought our lives into conformity to God’s standards when we can pray for our persecutors. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who suffered and eventually was killed in Nazi Germany, wrote of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:44, “This is the supreme demand. Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God” (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller [2d rev. ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1960], p. 166).
We have seen: 1) The Misinterpretation: Matthew 5:43, 2) The Mandate: Matthew 5:44 and finally: 3) The Motive: Matthew 5:45-48
Matthew 5:45-48 [45]so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. [46]For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? [47]And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? [48]You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (ESV)
To love our enemies and to pray for our persecutors shows that we are sons of [our] Father who is in heaven.
• Sonship indicated inheritance rights, privileges, benefits and obligations.
The aorist tense of gençsthe (may be) indicates a once and for all established fact. God Himself is love, and the greatest evidence of our divine sonship through Jesus Christ is our love. “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Loving as God loves does not make us sons of the Father, but gives evidence that we already are His children. When a life reflects God’s nature it proves that life now possesses His nature by the new birth. Jesus described this reality earlier:
Matthew 5:9 [9]"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (ESV)
One of the commonest and most damaging criticisms of Christianity is the charge that Christians do not live up to their faith.
Even a person who has never heard of Christ or the teachings of the New Testament would suspect there is divine power behind a life that loves and cares even to the point of loving enemies-simply because such a life is so utterly uncharacteristic of human nature. A life of self-giving love gives evidence of sonship of the Father who is in heaven. That phrase emphasizes the heavenly realm in which the Lord dwells, the realm that is the source of this kind of love.
Those who are God’s children should show impartial love and care similar to what God shows. He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust
Those blessings are given without respect to merit or deserving. If they were, no one would receive them. In what theologians traditionally have called common grace, God is indiscriminate in His benevolence.
Matthew 5:46-47 [46]For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? [47]And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (ESV)
If the scribes and Pharisees were certain of any one thing it was that they were far better than everyone else.
But Jesus again cuts through their blind hypocrisy and shows that their type of love is nothing more than the ordinary self-centered love that was common even to tax-gatherers and Gentiles-to whom the scribes and Pharisees thought they were most undeniably superior.
Those were probably the most devastating and insulting words these religious leaders had ever heard, and they must have been enraged. Tax-gatherers were traitorous extortioners, and almost by definition were dishonest, heartless, and irreligious. In the eyes of most Jews, Gentiles were outside the pale of God’s concern and mercy, fit only for destruction as His enemies and the enemies of those who thought they were His people.
This is a rhetorical question. Jesus is not asking what the reward is, but is rather pointing out forcefully that loving those who love you will not bring a reward. (Newman, B. M., & Stine, P. C. (1992). A handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. Originally published: A translator’s handbook on the Gospel of Matthew, c1988. UBS helps for translators; UBS handbook series (154). New York: United Bible Societies)
If you love those who love you, and that is the same type of love that even the tax-gatherers and the Gentiles exhibit. “Your righteousness,” He charged, “is therefore no better than theirs.”
It is important to note that in the Jewish context the greeting is more than a gesture of hello; it expresses a desire for the peace and welfare of the one greeted. (Newman, B. M., & Stine, P. C. (1992). A handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. Originally published: A translator’s handbook on the Gospel of Matthew, c1988. UBS helps for translators; UBS handbook series (155). New York: United Bible Societies.)
The citizens of God’s kingdom are to have a much higher standard of love, and of every other aspect of righteousness, than does the rest of the world. Christians should be noticed on the job because they are more honest and more considerate. Christians should be noticed in their communities because they are more helpful and caring. Christians should be noticed anywhere in society they happen to be because the love they exhibit is a divine love. “Let your light shine before men,” Jesus had already said, “in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).
• This is the reflection of the Sermon on the Mount. The natural man thinks that he is not guilty before God if he is just a little better than another or if he does not commit the physical offence. Yet he is never poor in spirit, he never mourns because of his sinfulness. He never sees the depravity that needs redemption.
• Unless one sees the nature of depravity, there is no need understood for salvation
Quote: As J. Oswald Sanders comments, “The Master expects from His disciples such conduct as can be explained only in terms of the supernatural.”
People often use the declaration “No one’s perfect” as their basis for self-justification: “No one’s perfect, and God must know I’m doing the best I can.” In reality, “No one’s perfect, and no one does the best they can either” (see Romans 3:9–20). As long as we give credibility to our own feeble efforts at righteousness, we will never recognize our desperate need for a Savior.(Barton, B. B. (1996). Matthew. Life application Bible commentary (107). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers.)
Matthew 5:48 [48]You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (ESV)
The sum of all that Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount-in fact, the sum of all He teaches in Scripture-is in those words. The great purpose of salvation, the goal of the gospel, and the great yearning of the heart of God is for all men to become like Him.
Teleios (perfect) basically means to reach an intended end or a completion and is often translated “mature” (1 Cor. 2:6; 14:20; Eph. 4:13; etc.). But the meaning here is obviously that of perfection, because the heavenly Father is the standard. The “sons of [the] Father” (v. 45) are to be perfect, as [their] heavenly Father is perfect. That perfection is absolute perfection.
• Perfect in the Greek has the meaning of having come to completion or wholeness; it can refer to maturity or to moral and ethical integrity, that is, to being flawless. (Newman, B. M., & Stine, P. C. (1992). A handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. Originally published: A translator’s handbook on the Gospel of Matthew, c1988. UBS helps for translators; UBS handbook series (156). New York: United Bible Societies.)
That which God demands, He provides the power to accomplish. Man’s own righteousness is possible, but is so imperfect that it is worthless; God’s righteousness is impossible for the very reason that it is perfect. But the impossible righteousness becomes possible for those who trust in Jesus Christ, because He gives them His righteousness. Echoing Lev. 19:2:
1 Peter 1:15 [15]but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, (ESV)
Deuteronomy 18:13 [13]You shall be blameless before the LORD your God, (ESV)
Ephesians 5:1 [5:1]Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. (ESV)
That is precisely our Lord’s point in all these illustrations and in the whole sermon-to lead His audience to an overpowering sense of spiritual bankruptcy, to a “beatitude attitude” that shows them their need of a Savior, an enabler who alone can empower them to meet God’s standard of perfection.
Considering all that Jesus had said in this chapter, the perfection Jesus required of his followers did not include strict and flawless obedience to minute laws. It called instead for an understanding of how the law pointed to the heavenly Father who is himself perfect. The law itself was not the standard of perfection, God was. Those who loved God and desired to follow him would keep his law as he required. But they did this not on their own strength or to put themselves above others. They did this not because they were already perfect, but because they were striving to be perfect, to reflect their Father’s character.
As followers of Jesus Christ, how can we be perfect?
• In character. In this life we cannot be flawless, but we can aspire to be as much like Christ as possible.
• In holiness. Like the Pharisees, we are to separate ourselves from the world’s sinful values. Unlike the Pharisees, we are to devote ourselves to God’s desires rather than our own and carry his love and mercy into the world.
• In maturity. We can’t achieve Christlike character and holy living all at once, but we must grow toward maturity and wholeness. Just as we expect different behavior from a baby, a child, a teenager, and an adult, so God expects different behavior from us, depending on our stage of spiritual development.
• In love. We can seek to love others as completely as God loves us.
(Barton, B. B. (1996). Matthew. Life application Bible commentary (106). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers.)
Please turn to Hebrews 5
We are not to wallow in frustration in spiritual bankruptcy. We are to strive for holiness. The same work for perfection, is translated as maturity here:
Hebrews 5:11-6:1 [11]About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. [12]For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, [13] for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. [14]But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. [6:1]Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, (ESV)
Our tendency to sin must never deter us from striving to be more like Christ. The message of the Sermon on the Mount is that Christ calls all of his disciples to excel, to rise above mediocrity, and to mature in every area, becoming like him. The Christian’s High Calling cannot be met by those who attempt to do so on their own strength—only through the Holy Spirit. Those who strive to become like Christ will ultimately experience sinless perfection, even as Christ is perfect
1 John 3:2-3 [2]Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. [3]And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (ESV)).
(Format Note: Some base commentary from MacArthur, John: Matthew. Chicago : Moody Press, 1989, S. 337)
