Matthew 5:44
What does Matthew 5:44 mean?
But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you,
The short answer
In Matthew 5:44, Jesus gives one of the most quoted — and most resisted — instructions in the Bible: "love your enemies." He then spells out what that love looks like in practice: bless the people who curse you, do good to the people who hate you, and pray for the people who mistreat and persecute you.
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not command us to feel fond of our enemies, to enjoy their company, or to pretend the harm they caused never happened. Every verb in the verse — bless, do good, pray — describes an action, not an emotion. The love Jesus commands is a commitment to seek someone's good, and that commitment can hold steady even when affection is completely absent. That is precisely what makes the command possible. Feelings cannot be summoned on demand, but blessing and prayer can be chosen.
This reframing matters because most of us read Matthew 5 44 and immediately think, "I could never feel that way about the person who hurt me." Fair enough — but that was never the assignment. The assignment is to keep caring, in concrete ways, toward someone we have every natural reason to write off.
It is also worth seeing that the earliest church did not treat this saying as an extreme ideal reserved for saints and martyrs. When Paul writes in Romans 12:14, "bless those who persecute you," he is echoing this very teaching and handing it to an ordinary congregation as a general rule for everyone. From the beginning, loving enemies was understood not as heroic extra credit but as the normal baseline of Christian life. That shifts the question from "how could I possibly feel that?" to something far more workable: what would blessing this particular person actually involve?
What scholars say
These excerpts answer the two questions this verse raises most often: Luther E. Smith Jr. explains how love can be commanded at all — because love compels caring beyond feelings of affection — while Jerome F. D. Creach shows that Paul, echoing this teaching in Romans 12:14, applied it as a maxim for all Christians in all churches.
“Likewise, although we often speak of “love” in terms of personal feelings, love is more than feelings of affection. Love compels caring, even when we do not feel affectionate toward another. When Jesus instructed, “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44), he called us to relate with love, even though we suffer our enemies’ abuses. Also, we can experience love from others even when we do not feel loved. However intense our passion for someone or something, our feelings and behaviors do not exhaust the power and meaning of love. We must take care to avoid domesticating love and hope as only human emotions. Love and hope are God’s essential transformative forces for beloved community. A community based on hope requires love, and a community based on love requires hope.”
“In addition to the instruction in Matthew 5:21–48, Jesus’ teachings on violence appear in the writings of the apostle Paul in the form of a more general principle: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (Rom. 12:14). Here Paul seems to know the instructions of Jesus, and he extrapolates from them a maxim for the church. Hence it seems that Paul understands Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence to apply to all Christians in all churches.”
What it means for you
Start with the person who came to mind while you read the verse — the difficult coworker, the estranged relative, the one who wronged you. You are not being asked to manufacture warmth toward them. You are being asked to do something: pray for them by name this week, refuse to retaliate in word or online, and look for one concrete way to do them good.
That may feel costly, and it is. But because this love is a practice rather than a mood, it is available to you today, exactly as you are — resentment and all. Often the feelings follow the actions, not the other way around.
Matthew 5 in context
Matthew 5:44 sits in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' extended teaching that opens with the Beatitudes and describes life in God's kingdom. In verses 21–48, Jesus works through a series of contrasts — "you have heard that it was said... but I tell you" — deepening familiar commands about anger, lust, oaths, and retaliation. Loving enemies is the climax of the series. Where the surrounding culture said to love your neighbor and hate your enemy, Jesus extends love to its furthest edge, just before the chapter's closing call in verse 48.