Difficult Love (Friday Devotional)

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same?

- Matthew 5:46-47

Every now and then, when the sports calendar is in a dry period, an evergreen controversy will consume talk radio: athletes today fraternize too much with their opponents. Following a friendly pregame hug or a lengthy postgame chat between players on opposing sides, sports pundits (often former athletes themselves) will talk about how “back in my day,” rivals hated each other, how icons from Ty Cobb to Michael Jordan refused to so much as speak to the opposition, much less treat them as friends. The implication is clear: you should hold tight to your team, but should be wary—if not outright hostile—towards others.

There’s something very relatable about that instinct. We are always most comfortable around those who are most like us: those who live where we live, go to school where we go, make the kind of money we make, vote like we vote, and believe what we believe. Those are easy friends to make, and you feel an immediate kinship to them because of all your similarities. If all your neighbors were like them, life would be easy.

But Jesus offers a gentle word caution: not all your neighbors are like you. In the kingdom of God, we are called to love not only our friends and family, but even our enemies. The “neighborhood” we are called to love is not a gated community, but an expansive world, made up of both like-minded allies and divergent strangers—and we are called to love each and every one of them in Jesus’s name.

It’s tempting to build a bubble of nice, middle class, Christian believers, and to disregard the rest of the world. But the Lord points us to a bigger project: not simply surrounding ourselves with easy, comfortable friends, but reaching out to lost souls. Sticking with your team may work on the ballfield, but it has a distinct weakness in the real world: your roster never grows.