Hate your enemies? What's up with that?

 Consider the text:

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (Matt 5:43:44) 

This is a passage that my reformed brethren, in my opinion, use properly in one sense and misuse in another.  To those who argue that Jesus was abrogating the decalogue in the “you have heard it said” sequence in the Sermon on the Mount, this verse is properly employed in the counter-argument, given that “Hate Your Enemies” was not one of the big 10. Fair enough. ¹  But many reformed go too far, and insist that Jesus was not introducing anything new, he was merely correcting bad teaching.  According to this argument, Jesus is not introducing new law by contrasting it to the old, because "hate your enemy" is not only not a commandment, but it was never taught in the Old Testament, period.

It is a strong argument, a compelling argument,  save for the inconvenient fact that it is not correct.

First, as circumstantial evidence, we have the conquest of Canaan, where God commands the execution of entire peoples: men, women, and children. We are not going to have the usual (and for me, ultimately unsatisfying) discussion about how to understand the commands (I, quite frankly, gave up long ago) but view them in light of "hate your enemy." Would not any reasonable Jew, primordial pharisee or not, have viewed the command as being, as a default position, tantamount to hate your enemies the Canaanites? Especially absent any caveat to counter the default position, such as "love them as you kill them."  At best you have to take the position that the command to annihilate the Canaanites carried with it an implied subcommand that it should be done neutrally, without emotion.

More circumstantial evidence is the existence (without condemnation) of a substantial collection of imprecatory prayers.  Was David loving his enemies when he prayed:

²² Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap. ²³ Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. ²⁴ Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. ²⁵ May their camp be a desolation; let no one dwell in their tents. (Ps. 69:22-25) 

It would appear to be so only for ridiculously small values of "love."

For explicit evidence, in the form of a "thou shalt" command, we can examine this passage:

³ No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, shall ever enter the assembly of the Lord, ⁴ because they did not meet you with food and water on the way when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you. ⁵ Nevertheless, the Lord your God was not willing to listen to Balaam, but the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you. ⁶ You shall never seek their peace or their prosperity all your days. ⁷ “You shall not detest an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not detest an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land. ⁸ The sons of the third generation who are born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord. (Deut. 23:3-7) 

Here the Jews were told not to hate the Edomites nor the Egyptians. This is stated as a direct contrast to how they should treat the Ammonites and Moabites. The logical conclusion of the contrast is not by implication only,  it is direct and inescapable: The Jews, when commanded not to hate Group B, are being told: hate Group A only.  You would have to perform an olympic-level exegetical gymnastics routine to argue otherwise.

Following Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on The Mount, we are no longer permitted to hate our contemporary versions of the Ammonites and Moabites. ²  It is new law, it is not merely correcting bad teaching.  Which is not to say that the Pharisees were not engaged in bad teaching--for they obviously were.  But that is not what Jesus is addressing here.

This mistake is, as I've stated before (and is clearly just my opinion) tied to our (reformed) tendency to overemphasize continuity. It is the same category error that dispensationalists make, except they overemphasize discontinuity.

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¹ I used to make that argument, that the Ten Commandments were replaced by the Sermon on the Mount. I would now characterize my position as saying that they were subsumed (the difference being real but nuanced) by the Sermon on the Mount, which also included law newly introduced by Jesus. Because, you know, he kinda had the authority to do so, and he exercised that prerogative.

² We (Christians) are pretty terrible at loving our enemies. And I'm not just talking about hating atheists, The New England Patriots, or other religions. We routinely display the most vicious hatred for fellow believers with insignificant doctrinal differences, i.e. differences that are not about the gospel. The Puritans, often the standard bearers for the reformed, covenant theologians to the core, executed both Baptists and Catholics for heresy. One could, I suppose, attempt to argue that it was an act not of hatred, but of love. (We don't, as a matter of practice, even treat people who leave our churches with love. We really suck at the love thing.)