WHEN JESUS TAUGHT that we should love our enemies, he spoke as someone who knew that he would be continually harassed by those who were threatened by his teaching. He knew that he would eventually be convicted of religious crimes he didn’t commit, then tortured and executed, a victim of jealousy and political intrigue. He tried to tell his disciples this, but they didn’t want to hear it. He tried to tell them that they should expect to be persecuted as well, but they wouldn’t understand this until later. Love your enemies, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. He meant it, and demonstrated it on the cross.

But let’s get real. How many of us are actually being unjustly persecuted for proclaiming the gospel? Sure, we may face opposition from people who take a different stand on issues of politics and social justice. If we post our opinions on social media, we can expect to get some angry pushback. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, is some of that pushback because our words — though they feel righteous and justified — are angry and demeaning?

Love your enemies. I doubt that many of us are actually anticipating being executed by agents of the state and then heroically forgiving them with our dying breath. And the teaching of Jesus doesn’t assume such a dramatic story. Our “enemies” aren’t those who are lurking in the bushes, waiting to ambush and murder us. Look again at the context of the teaching in both Matthew 5 and Luke 6. Our enemies are the people we want to hold at arm’s length because we don’t like them. Our enemy is the neighbor who borrowed a tool and never gave it back. Our enemy is the person who insulted and cursed us. We don’t want to have anything to do with them, and we certainly don’t want to be nice to them.

Nobody’s trying to crucify you. But you might have a few of that kind of enemy.

LOVING OUR ENEMIES isn’t some kind of pious idealism. When Jesus says in both Matthew 5 and Luke 6 that we are to pray for those who persecute or mistreat us, we don’t have to envision extreme cases like Jesus being killed on the cross, or Stephen being stoned to death, as we can read about in Acts 7. Our ordinary, everyday enemies can be the people we’re angry at for whatever reason, people against whom we hold a grudge. Jesus isn’t saying, “Pray for the evil people who have sent a contract killer after you” — he’s saying, “Pray for the people you personally don’t want to pray for.”

That’s one way to love them, or as Jesus says in Luke, to “do good to them” (Luke 6:35).

And what should we pray? For God to smite them with righteous vengeance? Well, there’s certainly precedent for that in the Psalms, but that doesn’t quite fit the example of Jesus. Should we pray for God to show them the error of their ways? Perhaps. That certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing. But in the context of what Jesus says about judgment at the beginning of Matthew 7, we’d best be sure that there hasn’t been any error in our ways, or we’ll be guilty of hypocrisy.

What, then?

As I suggested earlier, in the larger context of the whole teaching of Jesus, the commandment to love our enemies goes hand in hand with the Golden Rule. And if so, the simple answer to what we should pray is this: pray for them in the way you would want others to pray for you. Simple.

But not easy.

TO LOVE ONE’S enemies doesn’t mean to have warm and tender feelings toward them. That doesn’t mean that emotions aren’t involved. For both Jesus and Stephen, to pray that God would forgive their enemies was an act of deep compassion, a gut-level desire for the other person’s good. Frankly, most of us aren’t there yet. But we’ll never get there if we don’t start.

By definition, we don’t feel kindly toward our enemies, whoever they may be. Thus, typically, we don’t love them by miraculously changing our emotions; we love them by changing our actions. It’s an act of will, in obedience to the command to love. And we do this because we can envision the big picture: we want to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, because that’s the kind of world we want to live in. That kind of neighbor-love is the way God meant things to be.

We naturally know more about ourselves than we do about others. We know our own histories, our own stories. And we are the heroes and heroines of those stories, facing one challenge after another, overcoming adversity, and hopefully growing in the process.

And if we’re the good guys, then the story needs bad guys, and our “enemies” fill the bill. We tell our stories, whether to others or merely to ourselves, in such a way that our enemies may be one-dimensional caricatures. Their main and sometimes only function in the story is as a foil for our heroism; they are an obstacle to overcome.

But here’s the thing, the part we don’t usually recognize: our enemies are the heroes and heroines of their own stories. They have their own obstacles to overcome, and in their story, we may be the enemy, the obstacle. And even if not, in their story they are likely a much more complex and interesting character than our story portrays them to be.

When we pray for our enemies in line with the Golden Rule, we take a step toward seeing them in a new light. Like us, they are created in God’s image. Like us, they are objects of God’s love and mercy. Like us, they have needs and wants, hopes and dreams. They have overcome obstacles in their own lives, and are still struggling against obstacles we may not see.

If we pray for them, our eyes may be opened, even if just a crack. If we keep praying for them, who knows? Maybe our feelings will change too.