When Jesus explains his final quotation from the Bible, Love your neighbor, he adds to the quote an implication some of his contemporaries found there: hate your enemy. He is probably speaking of all kinds of enemies. Personal enemies were common enough in the setting of Galilean villages (Horsley 1986; Freyne 1988:154), but Jesus' contemporaries may have also thought of corporate threats to Israel or the moral fabric of the community (see Borg 1987:139). Whereas the biblical command to love neighbors (Lev 19:18) extends to foreigners in the land (Lev 19:33-34; compare Lk 10:27-37), other texts hold up a passionate devotion to God's cause that bred hatred of those who opposed it (Ps 139:21-22; see also 137:7-9). Popular piety, exemplified in the Qumran community's oath to "hate the children of darkness," may have extended such biblical ideology in Jesus' day (see Sutcliffe 1960). Jesus may well mean both personal and corporate enemies (Moulder 1978).

Jesus builds a fence around the law of love (Mt 22:39), amplifying it to its ultimate conclusion (compare Ex 23:4-5). In so doing, he makes demands more stringent than the law. He also makes a demand that can require more than merely human resources for forgiveness. Corrie ten Boom, who had lost most of her family in a Nazi concentration camp, often lectured on grace. But one day a man who came to shake her hand after such a talk turned out to be a former prison guard. Only by asking God to love through her did she find the grace to take his hand and offer him Christian forgiveness.

Since Jesus does not say exactly what to pray for our persecutors, some of us have been tempted to pray, "God, kill that person!" Needless to say, the context makes clear that Jesus means to pray good things for our enemies. Old Testament prayers for vindication (such as 2 Chron 24:22; Jer 15:15) still have their place (2 Tim 4:14; Rev 6:10), but our attitude toward individuals who hurt us personally or corporately must be love (Lk 23:34; Acts 7:60). Again, Jesus' words are graphic pictures that force us to probe our hearts; they do not cancel the Old Testament belief in divine vindication (Mt 23:33, 38; Rev 6:10-11), but summon us to leave our vindication with God and seek others' best interests in love.