How do I love my enemy?

The command to love your enemy sits at the heart of Jesus's teaching, and most people who take it seriously quickly discover it is one of the hardest things he ever said. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pushes well beyond the ordinary moral instinct to treat others as they treat you. He points out that even people with no particular virtue love those who love them back. The challenge he sets is different in kind, not just in degree. Christian tradition has spent two thousand years working out what this actually means in practice, and the honest answer is that it never becomes easy, but it does become clearer.

One of the most important clarifications Christian thinkers have offered is about what love, in this context, actually means. The Greek word used in the New Testament is agape, which is distinct from the warmth you feel for a friend or the passion of romantic love. Agape is less a feeling and more a disposition of the will, a commitment to seek the genuine good of another person regardless of how you feel about them. Augustine wrestled with this and concluded that you can will someone's good without liking them, without pretending the harm they caused you didn't happen, and without excusing what they did. This is genuinely freeing, because it means you are not being asked to feel something you cannot manufacture. You are being asked to act, and to keep acting, in a particular direction.

That direction has practical content. The tradition points to things like praying for someone who has wronged you, which is perhaps the most consistently recommended practice across Christian thought. There is something in the act of bringing another person before God, even haltingly, that tends to change you more than it changes them. It is difficult to keep someone entirely as a monster in your mind when you have stood before God on their behalf, even once. Thomas Aquinas added that loving an enemy does not mean pretending the enmity doesn't exist, or that justice is irrelevant. You can desire that a person face consequences for what they have done and still desire that they ultimately flourish. The two are not opposites.

Martin Luther King drew heavily on this tradition in the twentieth century, and his practical reflections are worth sitting with. He made a distinction between the person who has hurt you and the evil they have done or represented. You are not asked to love the act; you are asked not to let hatred of the act infect your attitude toward the person as a human being. He also noted that hatred corrodes the person who carries it far more than it damages the person it is aimed at. Loving your enemy, in this reading, is not naive or passive. It is actually an act of self-preservation as much as it is an act of grace toward the other person.

None of this means reconciliation is always possible or even right. Christian thinkers across different traditions are careful here. Loving someone does not require putting yourself back in harm's way, staying silent about what they did, or pretending a relationship is restored when it isn't. The New Testament itself contains passages about the necessity of naming wrongdoing and holding boundaries. What the tradition insists on is the interior dimension: that you do not allow what was done to you to define how you see the person forever, and that you remain open, however faintly, to the possibility of their change. That openness is itself a form of love, even if it never becomes warmth.

If you are sitting with a real person in mind as you read this, someone who has genuinely hurt you, the tradition is honest that this work is slow. It rarely happens in a single act of will. Christian practice tends to frame it as something you return to repeatedly, in prayer, in quiet, in moments when the anger rises again. The point is not to achieve a state of perfect benevolence and then tick the box. It is to keep turning back toward it, knowing that the turning itself is the practice, and that grace, in Christian understanding, meets people in the effort rather than waiting for the finished article.