Sunday's lection is Luke's version of the aphorism. It is also found in Matthew. New Testament scholars argue that material shared by Matthew and Luke come from a much earlier tradition ("Q" for quelle [German] or source).
This aphorism represents Jesus’s most powerful challenge* to empire's divide-and-conquer strategy. What is the worst situation of enmity between persons or peoples? Their being enemies. Jesus’s call to "love your enemies” subverts enmity.
In the gospel, we have “enemies who love,” who actually serve the least, who actually take the side of those whose only hope is God, who completely subvert expectations. There is Zacchaeus, the rich, chief tax collector who gives back to the poor and pays back four times everyone he had defrauded. There is the centurion, who not only loved the Jewish people and built their synagogue, but loved his slave dearly and sought help from the Jewish community when the latter was ill and close to death. Then, of course, we have the Samaritan who was a neighbor to the Jew who fell into the hands of robbers.
Loving our enemies is very hard. It is not based on emotions nor on relations. Loving our enemies requires a decision. It is agape. The One who calls us every day to follow him, chose to love his enemies to the very end.
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+art, "Hands, All Together," Avandale Patillo United Methodist Church, 2007 (from vanderbilt divinity library digital archives).
*The second-most powerful challenge to divide-and-conquer strategies is "Whoever is not against us is for us." But that is a story for another day.
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