Loving Enemies, Imitating God, and the Call to Wholeness | Matthew 5:43-48
Brian Hedges | February 15, 2026
Let’s turn in Scripture this morning to Matthew 5. We’re going to be reading Matthew 5:43-48 here in a few moments.
We are living in an age of tribalism. Lines are drawn everywhere: political lines, cultural lines, ideological lines, even theological lines, and we instinctively divide the world into groups, us and them. When we do that, it then becomes very easy for us to justify suspicion, contempt, and even quiet hostility towards those who are outside our circle.
We see this on every level of society. We see it between classes and races and political parties. We even, sadly, see it sometimes in the church, between different streams, different theological camps.
But that fragmentation in society and in our world reflects a deeper division, a deeper fragmentation. It reflects the fragmentation of our hearts and the division and disorder of our hearts. Our problem is that we are selective with our love and our goodwill. We extend warmth to some people and we withhold it from others.
This is not just a cultural issue, this is a deeply spiritual issue, and it is precisely the issue that Jesus targets in his words in the Sermon on the Mount that we will read this morning.
As we’ve been studying together the Sermon on the Mount, we’ve seen over and over again that Jesus presses beneath the surface of behavior to the heart. Jesus is giving us a portrait of life in the kingdom of God. This life is characterized by righteousness, but righteousness means right relationships.
Righteousness is not only a vertical relationship with God that is made right, but it is also the horizontal relationships of our lives, where we live rightly related to one another. And Jesus is not content with mere conformity to external rules; he wants a deep wholeness and integrity of our hearts and our lives.
That’s exactly what he goes after in this passage. Let’s read it, Matthew 5:43. We’ll read to the end of the chapter, verse 48.
“You have heard that it was said, ’You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 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. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect [the word might better be ’complete’ or ’whole’], as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
This is God’s Word.
The Sermon on the Mount is not giving us abstract moral theory, the Sermon on the Mount is giving us the commands of the King. King Jesus, who has inaugurated his kingdom in this world, invites us to be subjects of his kingdom, and the words of Jesus to us this morning are commands for us to follow and obey. Those commands press directly into the deepest fault lines of our age and of our own hearts.
I want us to work through Jesus’ teaching here in three steps and note, first of all, the problem that Jesus addresses; secondly, the call that Jesus gives; and then thirdly, the way in which we can obey Jesus’ call.
1. The Problem: Fragmented Hearts and Tribal Love
So point number one, the problem. And we could say that the problem here is the problem of fragmented hearts and tribal love. Let’s start with verse 43. Jesus begins with a quotation: “You have heard that it was said, ’You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’”
We know that the first half of that verse, “You shall love your neighbor,” is a direct quotation from the Old Testament. It comes from Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These are words that Jesus often spoke. When Jesus summarized the first and the greatest commandment, he said it’s that “you shall love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second commandment,” he said, is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
You think of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s gospel, Luke 10, and it’s all about neighbor love. What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? So this is Old Testament teaching that Jesus affirms.
But the second half of verse 43, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” that phrase is not found in the Torah. It’s not found in the Old Testament. It reflects a distorted understanding of love. “If I’m commanded to love my neighbor, and if my neighbor is defined narrowly, then surely I’m free to hate those who are outside my group.”
Now, to be sure, the Old Testament is nuanced in its language of love. It’s much more nuanced than this slogan suggests. There are passages in the Old Testament that speak very strongly about Israel’s enemies and God’s enemies and use very harsh language. We might think of the imprecatory psalms, where the psalmist will sometimes call down God’s vindication and God’s judgment on the enemies of Israel. But there are also very clear commands to treat personal enemies with kindness. Exodus 23 speaks of returning your enemy’s ox if it wanders off. There are clear calls in the Torah to love the outsider, to love the immigrant, to love the sojourner, the stranger.
But what had happened in Jesus’ day, and what still happens in ours, is that the command to love is selectively applied. This was happening among the people that Jesus speaks to. These are people who are under Roman rule. There are clear racial divisions between the Jews and the Gentiles, even between the Jews and the Samaritans. So they are saying, “Love your neighbor, love your fellow Jews, but you can hate your enemies.” They selectively applied the command to neighbor love.
We do the same. We expect people to love those who are near them. Love the people who look like you, love the people who talk like you, love the people who believe like you and share the same values that you do. But if people are outside that circle and they oppose you, or they threaten you, or they threaten your way of life, those people are different. They are other. They are the outsiders. And those people we tend to withhold our love from.
Jesus here is exposing, not just a bad interpretation of Scripture, he is exposing a deep disorder in the human heart: a heart that is not fully integrated under the reign and rule of God, and a heart that therefore withholds love from fellow man.
This disorder of the heart is a running theme in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Gospel of Matthew. We’ve seen it again and again. Jesus goes deeper than behavior. “You have heard, ’You shall not murder,’ but I say to you if you’re even angry with your brother without a cause, then you are in danger of hell and judgment.” Jesus goes deeper than murder into the anger and hatred of the heart. He goes deeper than the physical act of adultery to lust in the heart, and so on.
In each and every one of the case studies that Jesus has given us in this chapter, Matthew 5, he’s going beneath the surface into the real heart condition and showing what the true intention of God’s law, God’s will, is for us. And it is a heart righteousness and integrity of the heart.
This is because Jesus knows that it’s possible for us to be characterized by external conformity without the inward reality. We can keep the letter of the law while missing the spirit of the law. We can look righteous on the outside while we are unrighteous on the inside.
Jesus targets the same kind of division and disorder in the heart in other places in Matthew’s Gospel, in Matthew 15, where he quotes from the prophet Isaiah and he says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” There’s a division between what they say and the real condition of their hearts. Or Matthew 23, where Jesus speaks perhaps his most sharp words. He says, “You clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead bones.” Outside they’re clean, inside they are corrupt. There’s something wrong with the heart.
It’s that heart condition that Jesus is targeting here, the problem of loving neighbors and hating our enemies.
I think all of us are familiar with this division and disorder in the heart. This is something we have personal experience with. We know that there are parts of us that do not align with what God wants, and maybe not even with what we most deeply want in our deepest hearts.
We are familiar with Paul’s words, where he talks about doing what he hates rather than doing what he loves, in Romans 7. Or James, who talks about the double-minded, the two-souled person. We understand this.
We understand this in our culture. Modern psychology has developed language for talking about the different parts of a person’s heart, a person’s life, and how these parts war against one another, and sometimes one part sabotages another part of the heart or life. Jesus is going after that disorder of the heart, because the issue is not that we don’t love at all, the issue is that we love selectively. We love our neighbor, if we define our neighbor in a certain way. We love our family. We love our tribe. We love our church. We may love a number of people that agree with us on all kinds of things. But we still withhold our love from those who are “other.”
Jesus is showing that that’s a problem. That’s why verses 46 and 47 are so searching. “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? And if you greet only your brother, what are you doing more than others?” He says the tax collectors do this. The despised of society do this. The Gentiles do this, the unbelievers. What’s distinctive about your love if you just love those who love you?
You can think of an illustration of this from a classic film, The Godfather. You’ve got the Corleone family, and that family’s tight. They love one another—the whole opening hour of that film is a celebration of a wedding—but they are ruthless with their enemies. And if you cross the family, you will be subject to the worst forms of violence.
Well, on a less dramatic and less cinematic scale, that’s true in all of our hearts and lives, unless our hearts are healed by God’s saving grace and mercy and brought under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
So this is the problem—fragmented hearts, tribal love. I want us to just apply this and try to think concretely about how this shows up in our own world.
All of us have probably experienced this. We’ve witnessed this. Maybe we’ve even participated in it. You or someone that you know makes a social media post; it’s somewhat controversial. Maybe it’s a political comment, maybe it’s a theological comment. And by the end of the day, there is a whole thread of comments. You’ve seen this! People start commenting, they start interacting with one another, and before you know it, people maybe have never even met each other, but they are expressing contempt for one another, they are name-calling, they are taking clear sides, they are insulting one another. They are treating one another as the other, and those comments become filled with outrage.
Here’s an exercise for all of us this week. Ask yourself a series of questions.
Who are my people?
Who are “those” people? Who are the people that I tend to not think of as being in my group or in my camp?
And then especially this: When I speak about those outside my tribe, do I speak as a disciple of Jesus? Or do I speak as a partisan of something else?
Now listen, the problem is not that we have enemies. Christians, as long as they’re in the world, are going to be misunderstood. They’re going to be judged. They’re going to be persecuted. The problem is not that there are enemies or that we have enemies; the problem is that sometimes, even as Christians and even in the church, we do not apply the words of Jesus, and we are selective with our love. And that selective love reveals a divided heart.
2. The Call: Love, Imitation, and Wholeness
Jesus calls us to something better, and I want us to look closely at the words of Jesus here, point number two. And what we see is Jesus calling us to three things: to love our enemies, to imitate the Father, and to be whole.
(1) First of all, love your enemies. Look at verse 44. “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Jonathan Pennington, in his wonderful book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, points out that “this call to love is an appropriate final, culminating, ethical command.” He shows that in the ethics of Jesus, the dominant hue and tone of Jesus’ moral vision is love for one another.
We see this throughout the New Testament. It is the predominant command of both Jesus and the apostles to the church and to disciples, to love one another. Jesus even goes so far as to say, “This is how people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Here the command to love is applied not just within but also without. “Love your enemies.”
Now, what is love? What is Jesus calling us to? It’s important that we understand love biblically. He’s not calling us primarily to an emotion. Love is, rather, a settled posture of the will. It is a commitment to another person’s good. So loving your enemies does not mean approving of evil, if they are guilty of evil, but it does mean refusing to withhold your goodwill from them.
Jesus makes it very concrete. He says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Clearly, here are people who are doing wrong. They’re persecuting the disciples of Jesus. But Jesus says, “Pray for them.” We’re not to retaliate, as we saw last week; we’re not to do evil to them or wish evil upon them; we are to pray for them.
Let me give you a quotation from the commentary by Frederick Bruner. I thought this was very helpful. This is something of a summary of everything Jesus has taught in Matthew 5:17-48. Bruner says,
“Christian maturity is a whole-souled commitment for Jesus’ sake to protect other people. Christian maturity is looking at everyone we meet and saying, at least to oneself, ’I will never, God helping me, do anything to hurt you, either by angrily lashing out at you, lustfully sidling up to you, fearfully slipping away from you, verbally oiling you up, protectively hitting you back, or even justifiably disliking you.’”
That’s a stunning sentence. “I will never, God helping me, do anything to hurt you.” It is a settled commitment of goodwill towards all, including our enemies. This is what Jesus calls us to: love your enemies.
(2) Number two, imitate your Father in heaven, Matthew 5:44-45. “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”
Now it’s important to just clarify: Jesus here is not teaching that you become a son of the Father by loving your enemy. I don’t think that’s the point. R.T. France makes that clarification here. There is an assumption here that the Father is your Father. What Jesus is talking about here is resemblance, family resemblance. Love your enemies so that it will be evident that you are a son or a daughter of God, that you are a child of God, because this is how God treats people.
You see that in the rest of verse 45. “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” God is indiscriminate with his mercies. When the rain falls and the sun shines on two different farmers’ crops—here’s an evil, wicked, godless man, and the farm next to his is a righteous man—God lets the rain and the sun fall on both indiscriminately. This is common grace. This is what we call the doctrine of common grace, that God is good to all that he has made. He shows mercy to all of his creatures.
Now, this is not to deny that there is ultimately divine judgment for the wicked. Jesus speaks of that very clearly as well. But in this world as it now is, what we see is God continually showing kindness and mercy and goodness, even to those who do not believe in him. In fact, his goodness is meant to lead us to repentance, Romans 2 says. So because this is how God treats all, this is how we are to treat all as well. A family resemblance.
Paul puts it this way: “Be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love” (Ephesians 5:1-2). Or John puts it like this: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7).
Both of them are saying the same thing. Children should imitate their parents. Children resemble their parents in appearance and in behavior. Even the way kids talk is a reflection of the way the parents talk—the same vocabulary, the same cadence, the same turns of phrase—all of it reflects a family resemblance.
And Jesus and the apostles are saying the same thing. “If God is your Father, then live in such a way that you bear the family resemblance.” That means that when we face someone difficult, whether online or in person, even someone who is deeply opposed to our beliefs or to our values, we should ask ourselves, “What would it look like to respond in a way that reflects the Father?” We’re not trying to protect our pride, we’re not trying to defend our tribe; we are seeking to show the family resemblance.
(3) That leads to the final call of Jesus in verse 48: Be perfect. “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Or, this is where I think it’s important for us to actually look at the word; the underlying Greek word in this passage is teleios. Be teleios as your Father is teleios.
The word probably does not suggest what we tend to think of when we hear the word perfect. Again, R.T. France notes that this is a wider term than moral flawlessness. It’s a word that in Scripture often speaks of spiritual maturity. It carries the idea of completeness, of wholeness. This is a word that, when it’s used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it’s the word that was used to describe the blameless animal that would be offered as a sacrifice to the Lord. And the animal was blameless not because it was morally perfect—animals don’t have morals—the animal was blameless because it was whole. This was a sheep that didn’t have a broken leg, or this was a calf that was not deformed in some way. It was whole. It was complete.
What Jesus is saying here is that you are to be whole. You are to be complete, as the Father is complete. He doesn’t deny, of course, the moral perfection of God as our Father, but I don’t think that’s the intent of Jesus here. He’s going after the wholehearted love and integrity of heart that is needed.
Jonathan Pennington has a very helpful insight on this. He shows here that Jesus is essentially appropriating the holiness command from Leviticus. Leviticus 19:2 and Leviticus 20:26. They say, “Be holy, for I am holy.” But here, instead of using the word for holy, the word haggios, Jesus uses (or Matthew quoting Jesus) the word teleios. And so the call to holiness is clarified as a call to wholeness.
Why is Jesus doing this? Because this is precisely where the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees were lacking. They thought of themselves as holy. They thought of themselves as righteous, but it was surface level, it was externalistic, and they were missing the heart.
Jesus in Matthew 23:23 says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.”
Listen, when holiness is defined in a way that neglects love and mercy in the heart, we have missed the heart of God. And when righteousness is defined in a way that misses the importance of right relationships, both with God and with our fellow human beings, we have missed the heart of righteousness. This is what it means to follow our Lord. It is to have a heart that is whole, undivided rather than fragmented, and so a heart of love for all. So Jesus calls us here to be whole as our Father in heaven is whole.
3. The Way: Kingdom, Cross, Spirit
That raises a question that we’ll answer in point number three: how in the world do we begin to live this kind of way? This is countercultural stuff. Do you realize if every Christian in our country lived like this, how different it would be? If every Christian in the world lived like this, how different the world would be? This is revolutionary. This changes the world. This is how the gospel spreads on a societal level.
Read Rodney Stark’s sociological study, The Rise of Christianity, and he shows that the way Christianity spread was through Christians who lived this kind of way.
So, how in the world do we get it? How do we live like this? Point number three, the way. I want to show three things, and what I’m doing now, as I’ve tried to do throughout this series, is situate the teaching of Jesus within the broader gospel, New Testament context. We’re connecting the dots now. Here’s the way: kingdom, cross, and spirit.
(1) Number one, the kingdom. The kingdom is the saving reign of God revealed in Jesus. Jesus in his ministry comes on the scene in Matthew 4, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, the saving reign of God. The kingdom of God is near in Jesus because Jesus is the king. He is the one who is manifestly bringing God’s kingdom.
Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount in just this way. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” If you are poor in spirit, if you relate to God in this way of desperate dependence, then the kingdom belongs to you. Jesus’ call in the Sermon on the Mount is a call to live under the reign of God. This is a manifesto of the kingdom of God, where Jesus is giving us a portrait of what it looks like to be a kingdom citizen.
We have to ask ourselves, which kingdom claims our allegiance? Which king rules our hearts? If our first and chief allegiance is to King Jesus, and if he rules our hearts, that brings a kind of identity and a kind of security that will free us from the need to constantly fight for our rights, fight for our turf. Instead, it frees us to embrace the countercultural, counterintuitive values of the kingdom of God, humility and love and prayer and service and self-sacrifice.
Not only that, but the kingdom of God brings healing into our hearts and lives. When Jesus starts proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom in Matthew chapter four, what else is he doing? He’s going about it and he’s healing all over the place, and he’s literally healing broken bodies, but he’s also healing people’s hearts and souls, and that’s why so often people have an encounter with Jesus and he will say something like this, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” The word “save” is the word “heal.”
There is salvation on two levels, two dimensions. There’s salvation in the physical dimension as people are healed. They get a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God. But they’re also healed in their hearts as they are brought into relationship with God and his kingdom, and especially as Jesus goes after the outsiders. He goes after the tax collectors and the prostitutes. He goes after the Gentiles. He goes after the people who are outside the accepted, established religious circle, and he brings healing.
I can’t help but think of that wonderful line from Tolkien, “The hands of the king are healing hands, and thus shall the rightful king be known.” Jesus comes bringing the healing power of the kingdom of God because he is the king.
That healing comes supremely through the cross, where Jesus loved his enemies and mended the broken. Every one of the gospels ends with crucifixion and resurrection, as Jesus lives out the very things that he has taught his disciples. Jesus not only said that we are to love our enemies, Jesus did it.
Do you remember when Jesus is hanging on the cross, he’s being crucified? He’s literally being tortured to death by Roman centurions, and Jesus prays for his persecutors and says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
More than that, Scripture says that we were his enemies, in Romans 5. We were his enemies. It’s when we were yet sinners and we were enemies of God that God showed his love for us through the gift of Christ and through the cross, through which we are reconciled to God. It shows us that the cross is not just an example of enemy love, but it is the foundation of a whole new way of life for the followers of Jesus. We are called to live cruciform lives as we follow in the way of the cross.
I read a little anecdote this week where a child asked her mom, “What does God do all day?” I wonder how you would answer that question. This is what the mom said. She said, “He spends all day long mending broken things.”
He mends broken things. He mends broken hearts. He mends broken lives. He mends broken relationships. And we see him doing that supremely through the cross. Through his wounds we are healed. Through his brokenness we are made whole again.
(3) Number three, the Spirit. The Spirit is the great new covenant gift promised in the prophets—Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36. There are basically two promises in the new covenant: the promise that God will forgive our sins and the promise that God will renew our hearts and write his law on our hearts as he implants his very Spirit within us.
Do you remember what happens in Matthew 26 when Jesus, the night before his crucifixion, sits down with his disciples for a final Passover meal? He says, “This is the new covenant in my blood. I’m inaugurating the new covenant. The gift of the new covenant is coming, and it’s coming through my death as the Passover lamb.”
That’s the very clear implication as Jesus speaks to his disciples. He dies and he rises again so that he can send the Spirit. And what does the Spirit do? The Spirit comes and changes us, transforms us from the inside out. He writes God’s law on our hearts.
Listen, the Sermon on the Mount is showing us what that kind of life looks like. The Holy Spirit is the one who’s given to empower us to live that kind of life.
It’s something you can’t work up. This is something you can’t do to yourself or for yourself. It’s something that the Spirit of God has to come, and through new birth and through the gradual, lifelong work of transformation, he changes us so that we begin to love like Jesus, we begin to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, the first of which is love, in our lives and the world; because he’s changing our hearts, reshaping our desires, mending the brokenness deep in our fragmented hearts and souls, making us whole again so that we can love the way Jesus loves.
We could say it like this: the kingdom gives us a new identity, the cross gives us reconciliation, and the Spirit gives us new hearts, and this is the way fractured, divided hearts become whole.
Friends, the world needs this message of Jesus, and we need it as well. The call here is clear. We are to love our enemies, we are to pray for our persecutors, we are to imitate our Father, we are to be whole as our Father in heaven is whole, and Jesus shows us the way to that wholeness: through trust in him, submission to him as our King, as we live under the saving reign of God, trust in the reconciling power of the cross, and transformation through the new covenant gift of the Spirit.
Have you begun to experience that this morning? If not, through trust in Jesus Christ, giving your heart and your life to him, you can.
For all of us who are Christians, we are called to nothing less than this. This is the call. This is the way to live. This is the way of the kingdom of God. So let’s ask God to search our hearts, and wherever it is needed, let’s turn from any ways in which we have failed to live under God’s reign and submit ourselves once again to our King. Let’s pray.
Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your word, which searches our hearts to the deepest possible level, and we acknowledge our absolute dependence on you now to change us, to transform us, to heal the brokenness of our hearts, to reorder our loves, and to make us whole again. This is something we cannot do for ourselves. This is something that a mere sermon cannot do. Mere information does not change, but it is the work of your Holy Spirit to change us and to renew us through the ministry of your Word and through the ministry of the table. So we pray right now that you would do that; that you would work deeply in our hearts and in our lives to so deeply imprint upon us the love of our crucified King that we will begin to live in this cruciform way.
Search us now and show us anything that needs to change on the practical, behavioral level—anything in attitude, in word, in behavior, in action. Then, Lord, give us the grace to submit ourselves to you and to follow Jesus.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning and we see in the sacred emblems of bread and juice the sacrifice of Christ crucified for us because of his love, may it move our hearts, may it fuel us for lives of love that you’ve called us to. And Lord, we pray that your Spirit would work to accomplish that in us this morning. So draw near, we pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
