THE HARDEST TEACHING

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February 8, 2026

 

“Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” – Luke 6:35

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People have asked me what I find to be the hardest of Jesus’ teachings. My answer is drawn from the above passage, and from related sayings like Matthew 5:44, “But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It’s easy enough to quote these words. It’s even possible, in the abstract, to nod along approvingly or to imagine a world in which everyone lived this way. It can also be tempting to turn this teaching outward, toward others, and think, If only those people would learn to love their enemies, the world would be better.

 

And perhaps the world would be better. But that temptation points to why this is, for me, the hardest of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus did not offer these words as a tool for self-righteousness or as another standard by which to measure the perceived moral failures of others. He spoke to them to the people who were listening to him, people very much like us. This teaching is not an invitation to evaluate the hearts of others, but a demand from those who would follow Jesus to attend to our own hearts. Jesus calls us to examine our attitudes, and the actions that flow from them, rather than to wait for someone else to change first and lament when they do not.

Just like the religious expert sought to justify himself by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” we may find ourselves asking a parallel question: “Who, exactly, are my enemies?” Sometimes that question can function less as a search for understanding and more as a quiet attempt at self-exemption. After all, if someone falls outside the categories of “neighbor” and “enemy,” maybe we can justify not living them at all, right?

 

Jesus taught something different, though. His response to the original question ("Who is my neighbor?") was the familiar Parable of the Good Samaritan. To many who heard it, Samaritans were not simply strangers; they were outsiders, people who believed wrongly, lived wrongly, and stood on the far side of religious and cultural boundaries… the enemy! And yet Jesus held the Samaritan up as the example of faithful love.

 

Our own society has no shortage of modern equivalents. We divide ourselves by religion, culture, politics, and countless markers of identity. We are often encouraged to preserve these divisions, to see “those people” not as equals or fellow human beings (themselves bearing the divine image), but as threats, abstractions, enemies. In doing so, we can easily slip into dehumanization. And dehumanization, when left unchecked, leads to real harm: erasure, domination, and fear.

 

The people listening to Jesus knew this dynamic well, especially under Roman occupation. And still, Jesus looked at them and said, “Love your enemies.” For Jesus, love was not mere sentiment. It was a reorientation of the heart, a deliberate refusal to reduce others to something less than human, even when others might do so to us or to those we wish to protect.

Even as Jesus explicitly taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, I know a lot of us feel strongly called to stand up for those who face persecution, those who are harmed or marginalized. Loving enemies does not require abandoning that call for those called to it. It does not mean excusing harm, abandoning the vulnerable, or being unable to name injustice. Jesus himself confronted, resisted, and named wrongdoing. What Jesus did address in this teaching was something different: the way opposition can harden into contempt, and the way that even the pursuit of justice can become fueled by hatred rather than care and compassion. His call to love is not a retreat from moral callings, but a safeguard for the heart.

 

This is the heart of what Jesus was teaching. Contempt is a spiritual poison. It does not foster empathy but corrodes it. It does not strengthen morality but narrows moral imagination. It does not deepen compassion but trains us to see people as symbols instead of valuable human beings. I know that when others show contempt, it can be tempting to return it. But even when contempt feels justified, it reshapes us. Jesus’ warning is protective, not permissive. He was not teaching us how to change “them,” but how to guard our own hearts and to be conduits of love rather than hate.

 

One of the most enduring spiritual disciplines in our tradition is prayer. Prayer has often been framed as supplication, an attempt to influence God toward certain outcomes we desire. Yet prayer’s deepest effects are internal. As a discipline, prayer can reorient the heart, interrupting the reflexive anger or hatred that can take hold of us. When Jesus teaches us to pray for our enemies, he is not asking us to wish them success in their wrongdoing, nor to pray cynically for their downfall. He is inviting us to hold them in prayer as human beings, no less valuable than ourselves. In doing so, we refuse to reduce them to monsters, and we resist allowing our anger to become our identity or to shape how we see others. Because it is a discipline, this kind of prayer is slow and often uncomfortable work. Still, Jesus offers it as a path toward love and following Jesus means learning how to walk that path.

 

Jesus did not ground his teaching in some sort of fleeing idealism, but in the very character of God. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says, “for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” This is an invitation to imitation. God’s kindness is not reserved for the seemingly deserving; it is given freely, even where gratitude is absent and behavior falls short (or is downright harmful). When our teacher Jesus calls us to love our enemies, he is asking us to let the generosity of God shape our hearts. Jesus invites us to order our inner lives according to divine kindness, so that resentment and contempt toward our enemies (political, social, or otherwise) do not become the lenses through which we see the world and the people in it, all of whom bear the divine image.

 

If this teaching feels difficult, I fully agree with you. Maybe this is because the teaching reaches into places we would rather leave unexamined. Loving enemies is not a lesson easily mastered, but a discipline we must return to again and again. It asks us, daily, what is taking shape within us? Are we giving kindness room to grow, or contempt? Jesus does not ask us to personally solve all the world’s divisions, but to attend faithfully to the condition of our own hearts. That is where love, real love, must always begin.

 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned.” – Song of Solomon 8:6-7

 

Rev. Brian J. Kelley

Director of Ministry Resources, Unitarian Christian Church of America (UCCA)