Jesus spends the rest of this section talking about what loving our enemies looks like. Thankfully, Jesus does not leave the command there. We want to only love our friends and family. So this is the thinking that Jesus is teaching against when he gives these instructions. But you can bear the grudge to those outside the family of Christ. In our terminology, it would be the same as teaching that we are not be take vengeance or bear a grudge to anyone who is a Christian. They taught that there were limits to brotherly love.
Many rabbis, however, taught that this verse only applied to relationships within Israel. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. But God had clearly condemned this attitude in the scriptures. This was the problem in the first century as well where the Jews had also adopted this worldly philosophy.
Unfortunately, Christians have adopted much of the same attitude. Lysias wrote, “I consider it established that one should do harm to one’s enemies and be of service to one’s friends.” I believe the world has the same philosophy today. This was the philosophy of the world at that time. The natural response would be for us to hate them and hurt them. We pointed out in the last lesson that when we are serving the Lord, people are going to hate us, exclude us, insult us, and reject us as evil (6:22). There are two kinds of people, according to what Jesus taught in 6:20-26: people who suffer for his sake and have his blessing, and people who live for themselves and will come to an unhappy end. Jesus also pronounced four woes against self-satisfied people who were living for the pleasures of the moment and thought they could do without God. His disciples would endure poverty, hunger, sorrow, and persecution, but in their suffering they would know his blessing. After selected these twelve, Jesus teaches what it means to follow him. These twelve apostles were the divinely appointed ambassadors who would preach his gospel to the world. Jesus has called twelve disciples to be his apostles. It is a command that seems beyond our ability to attain. What Jesus is commanding is rightly called the hardest commandment. After teaching the disciples and the crowd about who is blessed and who will receive woes, Jesus continues his teaching about what the people of God do and how the people of God act.
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