Matthew 5:44

The context

Matthew 5:44 falls in the last of the six antitheses of 5:21-48, in the Sermon on the Mount. Each cites what "was said" and sets Jesus' word against it. The formula here reads, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." The first half is Leviticus 19:18; the second is not an Old Testament command at all, but at best a popular inference. Jesus is correcting a teaching, not quoting a statute.

The command is followed by its rationale in 5:45 — the Father makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust — then by the comparison with tax collectors and Gentiles, and by the summons to be teleioi, complete or mature, in 5:48.

The words

Agapate is a present imperative of agapaō: keep on loving, a command to a settled and continuing disposition expressed in action. It names no feeling. The paired imperative proseuchesthe, keep praying, makes the command concrete — one act toward the enemy, one toward God on the enemy's behalf.

Echthrous, "enemies," is the same word used in the quoted tradition of 5:43, so the command deliberately takes up the category just named. Diōkontōn is a present participle of diōkō, "pursue, persecute," describing ongoing harassment rather than a single offense. The love commanded is aimed at people currently doing harm.

Teleioi in 5:48 carries the sense of wholeness or maturity, and its context is the Father's undiscriminating generosity.

What this passage establishes

Enemies are commanded objects of love and prayer, and the ground is the character of God, who gives sun and rain without discriminating. The disciple's conduct is to imitate that pattern.

What it does not establish

It does not require affection, or the absence of anger. Agapē here is commanded action, and the text says nothing about feeling. Reading a warm interior state into the imperative makes the command either impossible or trivial.

It does not abolish boundaries or consequences. The verse commands love and prayer; it does not say wrongdoers must be trusted, that harm goes unaddressed, or that civil authority should sheath its sword. The Sermon addresses disciples, and how its ethics bear on the state is a further question.

It does not mean the Old Testament taught hatred of enemies. That is the point of the antithesis, and the misreading is common. The command to love the resident alien sits in the same law as Leviticus 19:18.

How the church has read it

Augustine treated enemy-love as the shape of the twofold command and the distinguishing mark of the city of God. Luther preached it as law that drives the hearer to grace before it can be obeyed. Tolstoy and the Anabaptist traditions read it as a literal ban on all force, while Reinhold Niebuhr called it an impossible ideal that judges statecraft without governing it. The disagreement is old and no one's exegesis has settled it.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• If Christians really cared about promoting peace and love, they wouldn’t be so flipping INTOLERANT!
• The God of the Old Testament a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, and a homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
• The Bible is a collection of fairytales written by illiterate goat herders back in the Bronze Age. The Catholic Church cherry picked which fables to include to mind control non-thinking tithers.

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.