Jesus teaches that loving our enemies is a way of mirroring the way Father God behaves towards all of humankind. After all he causes the sun to rise on the evil and provides rain for them as well. To love like God loves, is what is required of his children, it’s what God requires of his people, it’s what makes us most like God. Jesus says, it’s a mark of perfection!

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How important it is to realise that all of this law keeping—which is more impressive than that of the local pharisees—is culminated in agape love. The kingdom is ultimately expressed as love. Changed from the inside out, and transformed into the type of people who obey God’s command’s naturally the greatest fruit of such a life is love. This is the teaching of Jesus and it’s the teaching of Paul, the disciple of Jesus. When Paul famously tells us what love looks like in 1 Corinthians 13—patient and kind and not rude or self seeking—Paul is not telling us what to strive for any more than Jesus is teaching what to strive for in the Sermon on the Mount. Both teachers are explaining that a transformed heart, shaped in the ways of the master bears the fruit of love. That’s what the tree of righteousness produces. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:1 to earnest pursue love, because it is love which produces the type of life God seeks for us. As we “catch love," which can only come through Christ by the Spirit in us, we find that we behave the way Christ would behave.

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Jesus has described the kingdom life of goodness as controlling anger and avoiding contempt, declining to look at people lustfully and keeping our word, particularly for some their marriage commitment, it’s about handling offence, going the extra mile and loving those who many would hate. So is this meant to be hard? Is the good life a life of teeth extraction? Well, no, it’s meant to come relatively naturally. As we automate the way of the master from our enlivened hearts by his grace, and renew our minds and experience the peace of God in our emotions and enact his will thorough our body, the Christian life—flows. It’s normal to be good by the grace of God.

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Consider the Lord Jesus hanging on the cross. Do you think it was hard for him to say, Father forgive them they know not what they do? On the contrary for Jesus, the hard thing for him to say, would have been to call down curses on them in hatred. Jesus is wholly righteous, he is good through and through, he is love and he is light and he has come by his spirit to dwell in the hearts of all who would welcome him on the way of the master. We can learn to love the unlovely because it’s what love does.