“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy.  But I say, love your enemies!  Pray for those who persecute you!  In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.  If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much.  If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.  But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

                                          Matthew 5:43-48

I am challenged to the core every time I read this.  I think I always will be.  It is always a struggle to love people who don’t love me back.  It sometimes seems impossible to love people who not only refuse to love me back, but who actively do the opposite.    Both put me in defense mode and then often into offense mode.  When I’m being defensive or offensive, I can’t love. It’s actually a scientific fact. When the part of my brain (amygdala, in the brain stem) that is used for fight or flight activity (offense or defense) becomes active, it hijacks almost all brain activity.  This is so, in a crisis, I can act quickly and decisively to confront or avoid danger.

On top of that, once I become defensive (or offensive), my ego seeks to justify the action. So, when someone doesn’t return my love or returns it with disdain, my ego begins to build a case against them, justifying why I should stop loving or even start treating them as an adversary.  When I am trying to build a case that someone is a jerk and should be treated as an adversary, I begin to view all their actions through that lens.  This is classic self-fulfilling prophecy.  I need to see them as a jerk and so I do. 

The problem with this is that all this takes me away from love.  This is a problem not just because Jesus commands me to love, but because it reeks havoc on my soul as well.  I only love people who love me.  And because we all get love wrong sometimes, the people I love will get it wrong sometimes.  And when they do, and I haven’t trained myself to keep loving them anyway, the same adversary-building process I described above begins in my brain.   Another relationship turns sour. 

Jesus observes that this is our normal state. He reminds us that “even pagans” are like that.  He encourages us to resist the urge to settle for always-deteriorating love.  He reminds us that “you are to be perfect.”  By perfect, he means always-growing.  This requires a different part of our brain to engage. We’ll talk about that next time.

Question:  Have you ever noticed the internal process in you that transforms a loved person into an adversary?

Prayer: Prince of Peace, put your heart of love for all in each of us.  Empower us to love those we don’t love us and who we don’t want to love.  Help us remember that we too, are hard to love at times.  We love you God.  Amen.

Prayer Focus:  You know that person/those people that ticked you off the other day – pray for them today.

Song: Needtobreathe – Hard Love

Whether you like this style of music or not, pay attention to the lyrics…good stuff