HAVE YOU EVER been treated unfairly? I suspect that most if not all of us have. It may have begun with a simple misunderstanding — but it didn’t stay simple. You may have been not only misunderstood, but misrepresented to others, made to look bad in some way. The culprit may have been someone in your family, or a colleague at work, or someone at church. And unfortunately, as I’ve heard repeatedly, it may even have been someone on the pastoral staff.

How did you feel toward them when it happened? Later, when you thought of them and what they did to hurt or offend you, did you still feel the same way? What thoughts or images came into your head?

We can run through a gamut of negative emotions when we remember how others have hurt us. We may get angry and feel like we want to fight them or get revenge. We may feel a panicked feeling of needing to run away. We may shut down or feel hopeless.

And it can be hard to let go. Our brains are wired in such a way that we tend to focus on and remember negative experiences more than positive ones. As psychologist Roy Baumeister has suggested, if you find $100 on the sidewalk, you’ll feel good for a while. But if you lose $100 instead, you’ll feel bad — and those bad feelings will last longer than the feeling of good fortune. What an idiot I am, you may say to yourself, over and over. Or perhaps more suspiciously, Who stole my money?

Focusing on the negative may seem… well, negative. In essence, though, it’s a survival mechanism. After all, it doesn’t matter that much if you forget where you had that delicious meal. But you don’t want to forget where you got food poisoning.

The problem is, we can easily spiral into rumination, revisiting the same scenario in our minds again and again, digging an ever deeper and darker emotional hole. And the deeper the hole, the harder it is to climb out.

Of course, when we feel hurt, it’s always possible that we were the ones who misunderstood the other person. Given our predisposition to notice and defend ourselves against possible insult and injury, it’s easy — much too easy — to misread the motivations and meanings of other people when they inadvertently poke a sore spot from our past. The anger can spring up quickly and feel entirely justified, even righteous.

But whether our anger is justified or not, we have to contend with the words of Jesus: Love your enemy. This time, we’ll use the Common English Bible:

You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matt 5:43-45, CEB)

As we’ve seen, while Scripture has examples of God’s people hating God’s enemies for their wickedness, it doesn’t teach that God’s people should hate their own personal enemies. But of course, it was easy to read Scripture that way, ignoring the inconvenient parts of the Law that included Gentiles in the command to “love your neighbor.” And although Jesus doesn’t say it outright, one can easily imagine how the scribes and Pharisees justified their disdain of unclean Gentiles by reading Scripture that way, and taught others accordingly.

Once the people listening to Jesus got over the shock of being told to love their enemy, then what? What was a truly righteous person supposed to do? Could they simply flip a switch and turn their feelings of hatred into feelings of love?

No, and neither can we, not on our own initiative. That’s not how we’re wired. God can do it, of course; God can give us a heart of love where there was once only hatred. But Jesus doesn’t go in that direction, nor does he command the faithful to change their feelings. Instead, he commands them to take action: “Pray for those who harass you.” Later, the apostle Paul would write something similar to the church in Rome:

Bless people who harass you—bless and don’t curse them. (Rom 12:14)

Paul says this in the context of teaching his readers what it means to serve humbly with a mind that has been renewed, living in a way that demonstrates sincere love. “Don’t curse,” he says, reminding us of our natural reaction to people who harass or persecute us. Rather, we are to bless them instead. Or in Jesus’ words, we are to pray for them.

Of course, that doesn’t mean to pray at them. We might want our enemies to “get what they deserve” or even “see the error of their ways.” But we can wish these things with either a humble or an arrogant heart, with love or with hatred, resentment, and a desire for revenge. How do we know the difference? We have to be honest about the state of our own hearts. Do we know in our bones that we stand under God’s grace, that we’re not getting the condemnation we deserve? Are we willing to see the error of our ways? Remember Psalm 139: even when the psalmist speaks passionately about hating God’s enemies, those words are immediately followed by a prayer for God to search the psalmist’s heart and reveal any wickedness he may find there.

SO HERE’S THE deal. We know that God is perfect in love, as demonstrated through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. We know that we are supposed to be people who embody that love to others. And we know, if we’re willing to admit it, that there are people who are harder for us to love, people we don’t want to love, people with whom we would rather keep our distance. And don’t get me wrong: I don’t think anything Jesus says requires that we be friends with people who have genuinely abused us.

But are we willing to pray for them, to wish God’s best for them? Prayers like those can both humble us and open the door to compassion, even healing. To be sure, those are hard prayers to pray. But as we’ll see next, Jesus doesn’t expect us to be perfect at it — even if at first it sounds like he does.