When thinking about what it means to love one’s enemy, I am immediately reminded of the man who asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbour?”[1] Ultimately, Jesus’ answer is not a description of what a neighbour is, but a command to “Go and do likewise”[2] to the Samaritan who went out of his way to be merciful to a potentially hostile stranger in treacherous territory. In other words, if I am to be a neighbour to others, then who is my enemy? So, the first part of my answer to this question is that we are called not to be an enemy, nor to make enemies of others. Broadly speaking, we know this: be kind, compassionate, and empathetic; do good deeds and do not seek to do harm to anyone.
But what about those who actively harm or seek to do harm to me and to others?
Before I tackle that question, we must wrestle with a different question: what do we mean by love?
There are so many ways to answer that question, and so many ways it has been answered. In the Greek New Testament, there are at least two different words used that are both translated into English as “love.” Not being a Greek scholar myself, I will simply say that they capture quite different aspects of love in one word. In English we add qualifiers, such as brotherly love, filial love, platonic love, romantic love, and erotic love, among others. If I say “I love you” to my mother, it conveys something both similar and yet also quite different than saying “I love you” to my husband. There are similar emotions with both, but I act on those emotions in very different ways. With this concept in mind, I propose that love in the sense of loving our enemies ought to be considered an action or a disposition, not a feeling or emotion, and that the purpose of love in this sense is to restore dignity and humanize the other.
When we love those who are oppressed or in need, we can easily identify ways to act in love: uplifting, healing, feeding, clothing, and sheltering. Loving our enemies (i.e. those who oppress and create that need in others), however, is less easy to comprehend.
The idea of loving our enemies is often conflated with forgiving our enemies. Although forgiveness is integral to Christian faith and identity, forgiveness and love are not quite the same thing. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are to “forgive those who sin against us.” Many of us have been taught that forgiveness is therefore a Christian duty, and that withholding forgiveness goes against what it means to follow Christ. Without going down a theological rabbit hole on the Lord’s Prayer, I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. At least, it’s not how many of us have learned and experienced that teaching. It’s pretty well agreed in pastoral (and other) psychology that forcing someone to forgive someone who has traumatized them is in fact re-traumatizing and an abusive act in itself. I believe it’s perfectly acceptable to say to God, “I don’t want to forgive X right now. One day, I want to want to forgive them, but just now, I don’t and I can’t want that.” These things take time and work and the Holy Spirit, and with Thomas Merton, I believe that “the desire to please [God] does in fact please [God].”[3]
It is important that we recognize those times in our lives when we are offered the choice of acting in love even when we feel anything and everything but loving. Love can take many forms. It is quite possible that protesting an oppressive regime can be undertaken in love, so long as the signs carried and slogans shouted do not dehumanize the people in power. It is also possible that one might have the opportunity to interact face-to-face with an abuser and would need to choose between acting with mercy and acting without. For the sake of the oppressed and marginalized we love, holding people to account is essential to enacting both justice and love, and sometimes forgiveness is not even ours to offer—but we can still act with love.
This is why defining our terms is so key. If we think of love simply as filling needs and having warm fuzzies toward others, or as trying to write off or “move past” bad behavior, then to love oppressors and abusers may seem to be impossible and even to go against the foundations of the Christian gospel. But, if we think of love as restoring someone’s humanity, then there is space to think of toppling idols and knocking down pedestals. Not in a way that defaces or devalues the image-bearer that person ultimately is, but in a way that seeks to restore them to the human commonwealth, to bring them toward repentance and faith in the God who saves and restores. Speaking truth to power is love enacted if it is done in the Spirit and with openness toward the one being rebuked.
What does this mean practically? Deciding what it means to love should always be pragmatic and contextual, but I suggest that, regardless of context, love (and loving our enemies in particular) should always begin (and continue) in prayer. Prayer is one of the most practical actions a Christian can take. If we believe that God is present with us and that He wants to act with and for His creation, then to pray is the pre-eminent act of love both for God and for other human beings.
Several years ago, I spent some time at a Carmelite convent in England. Carmelites follow a Benedictine rhythm of work and prayer, but where Benedictines believe in balancing work and prayer, the Carmelites emphasize prayer and contemplation over and above manual labour. One of the sisters I met there had originally wanted to join the Little Sisters of Jesus, who are a Roman Catholic order of nuns that work in poor and marginalized communities (similar to Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity). Because she was Anglican, she had (mistakenly) concluded that she would not be allowed to join, and after much prayer and trialing life in several communities, she decided to join this Carmelite convent. Now, after more than a decade of religious life, she felt very strongly that the time she spent in prayer connected her to the world at a profound level, and that the work of prayer and contemplation she did daily was in fact the most effective way she could love others and effect change in the world.
This story has stuck with me, and I think it is particularly relevant to the idea of loving our enemies. Christians tend to be very good at praying for those in need, but to pray for those we dislike, those who have hurt us (or intend to hurt us), and those who use their power and privilege to harm others is an uncomfortable idea for many of us. At the most basic level, praying for others, especially those you might consider enemies will soften your own heart and will benefit your own relationship with God. I have heard from many people that praying for someone with whom they have an antagonistic relationship has dramatically shifted how they perceive that person. Beyond that, it’s impossible to define a consistent framework for how prayer impacts the world outside individual experience, except that it does seem to in many cases. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has often said (with wry humour, to be sure), prayer “can’t hurt, might even help.”
In keeping with my working definition of love as humanization, when you pray for your enemies, resist the urge to demonize and dehumanize those you are praying for; they’re probably doing a good job of that on their own. This doesn’t in any way mean that you need to justify their actions in any way. Rather, simply acknowledge that their humanity makes them capable both of harm and of redemption. Prayer puts things into divine perspective, placing judgement and salvation into God’s hands, and in return making the one who prays capable of greater love.
How to love your enemy is not an easy question; if I could come up with a point-form list of tips and tricks for loving your enemies, it would mean this question was also unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It has been my experience that wrestling with these things through prayer and practice is about the only way to begin to grasp at understanding.
So how do you love your enemy? Sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes with wailing and gnashing of teeth, and hopefully, eventually, in concert with God who is already loving them in profound and mysterious ways.
[1] Luke 10:29.
[2] Luke 10:37.
[3] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956), “The Merton Prayer,” accessed January 16, 2026, https://reflections.yale.edu/article/seize-day-vocation-calling-work/merton-prayer.
