The Impossible Command

The Impossible Command: What It Really Means to Love Your Enemies

There is a verse near the end of Matthew 5 that has a way of stopping people cold. After a long discourse on how his followers ought to live, Jesus closes the chapter with a command that seems not just difficult but outright impossible: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." No qualifiers. No exceptions. No footnote explaining that he really just means try your best.

He means it.

And the context surrounding that command makes it even harder to swallow. The perfection Jesus is calling for is not about personal discipline or moral tidiness. It is about love — specifically, love for people who have done nothing to earn it, and everything to forfeit it. Love for enemies.

What We Have Heard Versus What God Actually Said

Jesus introduces this call to love with a telling phrase: "Ye have heard that it hath been said." He does not say "it is written." He says "you have heard." That distinction matters enormously.

The people of his day had taken a genuine Old Testament command — love your neighbor as yourself, found in Leviticus 19 — and fused it with their own experiences of conflict and conquest to arrive at a conclusion God never actually stated: that it was acceptable, even righteous, to hate their enemies. They had watched God command Israel to drive out the inhabitants of Canaan. They remembered what the Amalekites had done to their ancestors. And so, over time, "love your neighbor" quietly became "love your neighbor and hate your enemy."

But God never said that second part.

This is a pattern as old as humanity itself — taking what God has genuinely said, mixing it with personal experience or cultural assumption, and arriving at a version of truth that conveniently supports the way we already want to live. The Old Testament itself pushes back against this. Exodus 23 instructs that if you come across your enemy's animal wandering astray, you are to return it. If you see his animal struggling under a heavy load, you are to stop and help — even if everything in you resists it. Deuteronomy 23 tells Israel not to despise the Egyptians, the very people who had enslaved them for generations, because God had plans for them too. Proverbs 25 puts it plainly: feed your hungry enemy, give your thirsty enemy something to drink, and in doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head.

The Old Testament, rightly read, agrees completely with Jesus.

A Picture Buried in History

There is a striking moment in 2 Kings 6 where the prophet Elisha leads an entire enemy army — struck blind by God — directly into the presence of the Israelite king. The king, seeing his helpless enemies before him, asks the obvious question: shall I strike them down? The answer is no. Instead, he is told to prepare a feast for them, feed them, give them water, and send them home. The text records that after this act of mercy, the Syrian raiding parties stopped coming into Israel altogether.

You want to disarm an enemy? Feed him.

This is not naive idealism. It is a spiritual principle woven through both Testaments. The way of God has never been to repay evil with evil. It has always been to overcome evil with good.

Love Is Not a Feeling

One of the most important clarifications that can be made about this entire discussion is that love — the kind the New Testament calls agape — is not an emotion. It is not the warm feeling you get around people you enjoy. It is a deliberate, willing, sacrificial commitment to the good of another person, completely independent of what you might receive in return.

Paul describes this love in 1 Corinthians 13 in terms that are entirely behavioral. It suffers long. It is kind. It does not seek its own. It is not easily provoked. It bears all things and endures all things. This is not a description of a feeling. It is a description of a choice — one made over and over again, often in direct opposition to how we feel in the moment.

Romans 12 makes the practical application clear. Live peaceably with all men, as much as it is possible. Do not avenge yourselves. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. The phrase "as much as lieth in you" is an honest acknowledgment that this is hard, that there will be moments when it feels impossible — but it remains the standard.

The Witness of Those Who Learned It

Stephen, as he was being stoned to death, cried out that God would not hold the sin against those killing him. The Apostle Peter, who once drew a sword in defense of Jesus and later denied knowing him three times, eventually wrote to the church urging them to bless those who persecute them, to not render evil for evil, and to understand that suffering for doing good is part of the calling. John, who walked with Jesus through everything, wrote simply that the proof of having passed from death to life is the ability to love a brother — and that anyone who cannot love is still living in death.

These were not naturally gentle men. They were men who had been transformed.

Yielding to the Impossible

Here is the honest truth at the center of all of this: perfection, the kind Jesus calls for in Matthew 5, is not something any human being can manufacture through effort or willpower. It is not a performance. It is a yielding — specifically, a yielding to the One who is already perfect, and allowing his nature to flow through ours.

The call is not to become something you are not. It is to get out of the way of the One who already is everything the command requires.

The people in your life who are hardest to love — the ones who criticize, who wound, who dismiss — those are the very people Jesus had in mind when he gave this command. Not because loving them will be easy. But because the love that reaches them when nothing else will is the only kind of love that can ever point them toward him.

That is the whole point.