Verse explainer
Jesus doesn't just raise the bar on tolerance — he commands active, willed goodwill toward people who are actively working against you.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
BSBBut I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
The plain meaning
This verse sits inside the Sermon on the Mount's series of "You have heard it said… but I say" contrasts (vv. 38–48). Jesus is not correcting the Hebrew scriptures; he is correcting a tradition that had quietly licensed hatred of enemies as the natural flip-side of love for neighbors (v. 43). The command is startlingly specific: love, bless, do good, pray — four active verbs, not one passive shrug of tolerance. The Greek word for love here (agape) points to willed, purposeful goodwill, not warm feeling. You can't manufacture the feeling; you can choose the will. Jamieson, Fausset & Brown note that Jesus himself is the best commentary on these words — he prayed for his crucifiers while hanging on the cross (Luke 23:34), and Stephen followed suit while being stoned (Acts 7:60). The section closes at v. 48 with the call to be "perfect" as the Father is perfect — a perfection defined in context as the Father's habit of sending rain on the just and the unjust alike (v. 45). The standard is not reciprocity but impartial, unconditioned goodwill.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Gill draws a careful distinction: a person's harmful actions may rightly be hated and resisted, yet the person himself is still to be loved with natural human affection. He reads the four commands — love, bless, do good, pray — as a graduated movement from inward disposition outward to concrete acts, each one designed either to win the enemy over or to put their hostility to shame. He notes this spirit is peculiar to Christianity and stands in direct contrast to the Pharisaic teaching that permitted ongoing resentment toward those who showed no repentance.
JFB emphasize that the word translated "love" here denotes not personal affection but benignant, compassionate desire for another's genuine good — a moral orientation of the will, not a sentiment. They argue Jesus is not introducing an entirely new law but acting as the incomparable interpreter of a principle present from the beginning, one the tradition had quietly buried. The best exposition of these commands, they observe, is the life of the one who gave them.
Henry reads the fourfold command as Christ's deliberate answer to the self-serving ethic of loving only those who love you back — an ethic shared equally by tax collectors and Gentiles (vv. 46–47). To love enemies is to imitate God, who shows common grace without discrimination. Henry stresses that prayer for persecutors is the highest and hardest of the four, requiring the most thorough conquest of natural resentment.
The word behind it
Second-person plural present active imperative of agapaō — "you [all] love" as an ongoing command. Agape-love in Greek refers to deliberate, principled goodwill directed toward another's welfare, distinct from philia (friendship-affection) or eros (desire). Crucially, it is a verb of the will, not of feeling — which is why it can be commanded. You cannot be ordered to feel warmth; you can be ordered to act for someone's good. This distinction is what makes the command possible rather than absurd.
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