“LOVE YOUR ENEMIES.” Of all the teachings of Jesus, this had to be one of the most counterintuitive, a contradiction of what we usually mean by both “love” and “enemy.” Our natural tendency is to divide the social world into more or less neat boxes: friend and foe, us and them, those we love and those we…hate?

Well…maybe not hate. Surely nice Christians don’t do that! So instead, we ignore, exclude, scoff at, and ridicule. And we may do it with the calm certainty that we’re in the right and they’re in the wrong, as we pray piously for God to show them the error of their ways.

The pious folk of Jesus’ day already knew the greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself. But over time, it seems, the second greatest commandment took a self-serving turn, inheriting a subclause: “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” In practice, it meant, “Love those who love you, and hate those who hate you.” Big deal, Jesus seems to say in the Sermon on the Mount. Do you think you deserve a gold star for that? Even the most immoral person on the planet loves their friends. You want to demonstrate that you’re a child of your heavenly Father? Then love your enemy — show love even to those who persecute you.

Here, I imagine the gears stripping madly in the heads of his Jewish hearers: What, you mean love Gentiles? Romans??? Are you kidding me?

No, he wasn’t kidding. And he proved it on the cross. The apostle Paul says as much in Romans 5: God concretely demonstrated his love when Jesus died for sinners, for the enemies of God.

And you can be sure that the apostle John believes this too.

GOD IS LIGHT, John declares. And anyone who claims to be in the light, who claims to know and have fellowship with God, must demonstrate it by their willing obedience to God’s commands. Specifically, they must do as Jesus said in the Upper Room. “My command is this,” he told his disciples, “Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12, NIV). Thus, in his letter, John says that those who love their brothers and sisters are in the light, while those who hate their brothers and sisters are still stumbling about in the darkness.

When John mentions “stumbling,” however, his Greek is a little ambiguous. You can see this in the variety of ways his words are translated into English. “Anyone who loves his brother and sister lives in the light,” he says in 1 John 2:10. Clear enough. But the sentence continues: “and there is nothing in them to make them stumble.” That’s the New International Version. More literally, he’s saying, “in him — or it — there is no cause for stumbling or offense.”

So is it “him” or “it”? The NIV goes with the former. But the Common English Bible opts for the latter: “there is nothing in the light that causes a person to stumble.”

Moreover, there’s the question of who might be in danger of stumbling. Again, the NIV reads John as saying that the person who lives in the light doesn’t stumble. Makes sense — they have the light to see where they’re going. But it’s possible to read John as meaning that people who live in the light, who love their fellow believers, don’t cause others to stumble. That’s the gist of Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message: “It’s the person who loves brother and sister who dwells in God’s light and doesn’t block the light from others.”

Does it matter? Yes. It’s one thing to say that if we walk in the light, we won’t stumble. Again, as metaphors go, that makes perfect sense. But it’s another to be reminded that if we truly love others, we won’t do anything to make them stumble — and that echoes the teaching of both Jesus and the apostle Paul.

John’s primary concern is probably that there are people in his community who are teaching strange ideas and leading others astray. But we needn’t imagine them as waking up one morning and saying to themselves, “You know what? I think I’d like to deceive some people today. Yes, that would be nice.” John portrays them as self-deceived, thinking they’re in the light when they’re actually lost in darkness.

I say all this because we as Christians have the same predilection as anyone else to read things in self-serving and other-blaming ways. When John writes, “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness,” we think, “That’s right, John, you tell ’em! Stop those people from stirring things up with their strange ideas.” They are the ones who need to be corrected. They are the objects of self-righteous scorn.

And all the while, we ignore how John’s words apply to us. We believe ourselves to be in the light, but hate those people, who are our brothers and sisters even if they are in error and making waves.

Wait, no, we might object. We don’t hate them; that’s too strong a word. But just as darkness is the absence of light, so too might hate be the absence of love. Typically in Scripture, “love” and “hate” are not names for discrete emotions, but orientations and attitudes. To “hate” someone doesn’t have to mean ranting and raving and wishing them harm; it can simply mean that we fail to love them.

And if we aren’t loving and compassionate toward them, if we aren’t bringing the light of love to the relationship, are we part of the reason they’re stumbling in the dark? Moreover, if we’re not loving our enemies, are we being obedient to the command of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount? And if not, do we even get to claim that we’re in the light?

Remember: when we fail to love, even when we think we have good reason, then we may be the ones stumbling in the dark. Time to take notice, and pray for light.