Love your enemies

Love your enemies is a command in the Sermon on the Level Place that breaks the logic of reciprocal affection: disciples are to love even those who oppose them and to be merciful as God is merciful. Read beside Paul’s persecution in Acts, the command becomes a test not only of individual conduct but of whether the church itself lives by the Realm’s values.

The Command in the Sermon

The command appears within Jesus’s instruction to love enemies and to do good beyond the circle of those who already show love. Loving only those who love in return earns no special credit; even sinners do that. The standard Jesus gives is instead mercy modeled on God’s mercy, a demand that reaches past ordinary reciprocity.

That teaching is set against blessings and woes. The poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted because of their witness to the Realm are blessed; the rich, satisfied, laughing, and well-regarded are warned of eschatological condemnation from the perspective of old-age values. Enemy-love therefore belongs to a wider reversal of the values that govern the old age, rather than serving as an isolated rule of politeness.

Paul as a Figure of Persecution

The parallel between Luke 6:20–36 and Acts 22:22–29 places Paul in a position resembling those described in the Sermon as persecuted, hated, excluded, and reviled. The mob’s hostility, in turn, resembles the posture of those addressed by Jesus’s woes. This correspondence brings the command into contact with a scene of real conflict: the question is not merely whether disciples feel goodwill, but how they act toward people implicated in persecution and hostility.

The tribune initially mistakes Paul for an enemy, supposing him to be the Egyptian who had led four thousand assassins. He halts the flogging, but the commentary does not present him as a full representative of the Realm: his intervention may also protect him from punishment for flogging a Roman citizen. The episode thus distinguishes an action that accords with the Realm from a motive the text does not establish as merciful.

The Church Put to the Test

The reading asks whether a church that hears the Sermon on the Level Place may itself resemble the mob when its actions violate the Realm’s values. The command does not permit a community to treat Jesus’s teaching as a judgment reserved for outsiders; it turns the question back on the hearers and their conduct toward those they oppose or exclude.

The tribune offers a contrasting, morally complicated example. Although implicated in idolatry and empire, he performs an act that resonates with the Realm by sparing Paul the flogging. The commentary invites preachers to consider whether people and forces outside the church may sometimes enact those values, even grudgingly, and whether modern counterparts to the tribune may prove more faithful in practice than some Christians. It raises the question of what motivates such conduct without supplying a single answer.