WHEN I WAS a graduate student taking theology courses, I had to do a lot of reading. A lot. And these books were not mass market paperbacks. Reading them took hour after painstaking hour of slogging through dense and difficult prose. Sometimes I would read a few paragraphs, realize that I wasn’t tracking, and have to go back and read them again. And again.

And sometimes again.

One of my professors was fond of assigning books by a particular theologian whose works had to be translated into English from German. This writer had a habit of making side comments that took the reader on a detour away from the main argument, the kind of comments that other authors might have relegated to a footnote. But at least you knew when these detours were happening, because they were printed in a smaller font.

For the sake of expediency, therefore, many students in these classes, myself included, began skipping the fine print. After all, we would think to ourselves, that’s way too much reading. How are we supposed to finish it all? We don’t need to read those side comments to get what we’re supposed to get.

I didn’t realize until I became a professor that the amount of reading assigned for a class is partly due to federal education standards. So on it went; my students had to struggle with the reading requirements just as I had. But in one course, on the first day of class, one of my students raised his hand. “Is it okay,” he asked, “if I just read the first and last sentence of every paragraph?”

Wow, man, I thought to myself, you’ve got brass. But really? You’re asking that out loud? I knew some students were going to cut corners somehow, but to ask permission to do it was a bold move. What should I say?

I decided to deal with the deeper issue. “I know it’s a lot of reading,” I said, “but obviously I’m not going to be looking over anyone’s shoulder to see if it’s getting done. You know what the requirement is. How you fulfill it is between you and God.”

Why am I telling you that story? Because I want you to think for a moment: have you ever cut corners on an inconvenient requirement? Have you ever had to rationalize away such behavior to convince yourself that you really were doing what you were supposed to do? Hold onto that thought, and let’s return to the Sermon on the Mount.

I’VE SAID BEFORE that the Pharisees deserve some credit for trying to teach God’s people how to follow the Law of Moses. The problem wasn’t with the goal, but its execution. Throughout Matthew 5, Jesus has been forcefully contrasting his teaching about righteousness with what the people have already been taught. And as we’ve seen, the final antithesis of the chapter is a particularly challenging one:

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. (Matt 5:43-45)

Let’s start with this: nowhere in Scripture will you find a direct command to hate your enemy. But having said that, it’s easy to understand how someone might read it that way. Consider, for example, Psalm 139, a well-known David psalm. You may even have sung some version of the last two verses of the psalm during a worship service:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting. (Ps 139:23-24)

What I’m sure you didn’t sing, however, are the two lines that come immediately before:

Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord,
    and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
I have nothing but hatred for them;
    I count them my enemies. (vss. 21-22)

Strong stuff. And there are several places in the Psalms where the psalmist pulls no punches in cursing enemies. If you’ve never read it, go back a couple of pages to Psalm 137 — that should raise an eyebrow or two.

It’s crucial, however, that we read these words carefully and keep them in context. Who are the psalmist’s enemies? It’s not those against whom the psalmist holds a personal grudge. Rather, because of a deep devotion to God, the psalmist hates those who hate God. Keep in mind too that the nations surrounding God’s people frequently engaged in truly wicked practices like child sacrifice. And still, even though it was right to abhor such things, the psalmist follows the curse with a humble prayer for God to reveal any wickedness in their own heart.

As I suggested previously, we humans have a well-documented tendency to fall into us-versus-them thinking, dividing our social world into in-groups and out-groups. Imagine, then, how this tendency can be recast in spiritual terms: we are the righteous, they are not. They do things their way, we do things God’s way. And there may be some truth in such claims, which makes them seem justified.

What we may not realize, however, is the way in which these claims become religious rationalizations for our in-group bias and our out-group prejudice. For the Pharisees and those who thought similarly, Scripture authorized Jews to hate Gentiles just for being Gentiles. And that, in turn, could lead to cutting corners on the inconvenient parts of the Law.

The commandment Jesus cites in the Sermon on the Mount can be found in Leviticus 19:18:

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

Obviously, someone might think, my neighbor is my fellow Jew. And frankly, the command to not bear a grudge against those of your in-group would be challenging enough. But before we get to the end of the chapter, we also read this:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. (vss. 33-34)

“Love them as yourself.” Clearly, the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself applies to resident aliens as well, in other words, to Gentiles living within their boundaries. And why? It’s an early version of the Golden Rule: You yourselves were foreigners in Egypt once. Remember what that was like? How would you have wanted the Egyptians to treat you? Shouldn’t you do the same for the foreigners among you?

BY THE TIME of Jesus, apparently, the command to love one’s neighbor had been overlaid with self-righteous ethnic prejudice. But this was a convenient distortion not only of the spirit of the Law, but of the letter of the Law, of what was actually written. And again, Jesus pulls no punches in calling out this ethnocentric hypocrisy: If you read the Law that way, you’re no better than a tax-gatherer.

If we want to be true children of our heavenly Father, we’ll have to get serious about recognizing the ways in which we cast people as enemies and use religious rationalizations to justify our hatred or disdain. Because as we’ll see, that’s not God’s way.