Phoenix Botanical Garden 3 31 12
In Jesus’ own life and career and in his instructions to his disciples, the enemy becomes a privileged object of love. Because we confess that the God who has worked out our reconciliation in Christ is a God who loves his enemies at the cost of his own suffering, we are to love our enemies beyond the extend of our capacity to be a good influence on them or to call forth a reciprocal love from them. In other ethical systems, the “neighbor” may well be dealt with as an object of our obligation to love. But Jesus goes further and makes of our relation to the adversary the special test of whether the love we have is derived from the love of God.
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| — | John Howard Yoder (via azspot) |
