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Catholic Commentary
Love of Enemies and the Law of Gratuitous Charity (Part 2)
35But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing back; and your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil.36“Therefore be merciful,
Luke 6:35–36 commands disciples to love enemies, do good, and lend without expecting repayment, with the promise of becoming children of God by imitating his character. This radical ethic is grounded in God's own unconditional kindness toward the unthankful and evil, requiring Christians to embody divine mercy regardless of reciprocity or worthiness.
Jesus promises that when you love your enemies without hope of return, you become a child of God — not because you've earned it, but because you're acting like Him.
Verse 36 — "Therefore be merciful"
The transitional gínesthe ("become" or "be") is significant: it implies an ongoing process, not a static state. The call is to become merciful (oiktírmones), a word with deep affective resonance in Greek — it relates to visceral compassion, the movement of one's innermost being toward another's suffering. Luke uses oiktírmones rather than Matthew's téleios ("perfect," 5:48), shifting the emphasis from moral completeness to compassionate identification with others. Luke's Jesus grounds Christian ethics not in legal perfection but in the mimesis of divine mercy. The truncated appearance of this verse in the cluster — ending with the comma — signals that the next verse ("as your Father is merciful") will complete the thought, but even this fragment carries its full weight: the summons to mercy is not conditional on the worthiness of the recipient.
Catholic tradition reads these verses as a charter for the theological virtue of charity and a window into the doctrine of divine filiation. The Catechism teaches that charity is "the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God" (CCC 1822). The love of enemies is identified as the "summit" of this virtue, the point at which charity most clearly transcends natural affinity and most fully images the divine life (CCC 1825).
The patristic tradition is especially rich here. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Matthew 18) insists that enemy-love is the identifying mark of Christian civilization, distinguishing it from every merely human ethical system. St. Augustine (Enchiridion, ch. 73) grounds the command in his theology of ordo amoris: properly ordered love wills the true good of every person, including the enemy, because every soul bears the image of God. St. Maximus the Confessor, drawing on this verse's promise of divine sonship, links gratuitous love explicitly to theosis: "He who loves God cannot but love every man as himself, even though he is grieved by the passions of those who are not yet purified" (Centuries on Charity 1.13).
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (nn. 4–5) connects this passage to the gratuitousness that must characterize Christian engagement with the world: justice alone is insufficient; charity must exceed what is owed. Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (n. 18) reflects precisely this logic when he writes that love "can no longer be a commandment in the ordinary sense; it is a response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us." The call to be "children of the Most High" also resonates with the teaching on adoptive sonship (CCC 1996–1997): divine grace elevates the human person to participate in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4), and this participation is expressed and deepened through acts of gratuitous charity.
For a Catholic today, these verses confront some of the most deeply-rooted instincts of contemporary culture: the economy of merit, the logic of social media reciprocity, the tribal politics that rewards friends and marginalizes enemies. Jesus' command to lend "expecting nothing back" cuts against both consumerist self-interest and the progressive instinct to reserve solidarity only for the politically aligned.
Concretely, this passage challenges Catholics to examine three arenas: financial generosity (giving or lending to those who may not repay, without resentment), relational charity (actively doing good for those who have wronged us — not merely tolerating them), and political life (refusing to dehumanize opponents, praying for them, seeking their genuine good). The promise of divine filiation is the motivating power: we are not merely trying to be nice; we are enacting our identity as God's children, making visible the mercy of the Father who sustains even the ungrateful. Pope Francis' frequent calls for a "culture of encounter" (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 220) draw directly on this logic. A practical starting point: identify one person you find it hardest to wish well, and each day for a week, pray for a specific blessing upon their life.
Commentary
Verse 35 — "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing back"
The adversative "but" (Greek: plēn) sharpens the contrast with the transactional morality critiqued in vv. 32–34, where even sinners love those who love them back. Luke's Jesus here specifies three ascending actions: love (the interior orientation of the will), do good (the active expression of that love in deeds), and lend, expecting nothing back (mēden apelpízontes — literally "despairing of nothing back," or expecting no return whatsoever). This third command is the most economically radical: in a first-century honor-and-patronage society, lending was inextricably tied to social reciprocity and status enhancement. To lend without expectation of return was to step entirely outside that system, treating the borrower not as a client but as an end in himself.
The Greek verb agapáte (love) here is imperative — this is not a counsel for the spiritually advanced but a command structuring Christian moral life at its foundation. It is agápe, the self-donating love distinguished from éros (desire-love) and philía (friendship-love). Jesus commands an act of the will directed toward the genuine good of the other, regardless of emotional feeling or social calculus.
"Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High"
The promise of "great reward" (misthòs polús) is not a concession to self-interest but an eschatological reorientation: the reward is not earthly reciprocity but divine kinship. The phrase "children of the Most High" (huioì Hypsístou) is theologically momentous. In the Semitic idiom, to be called "children of" someone meant to share in that person's character and nature. Jesus is saying that the disciple who loves gratuitously resembles God and, in resembling Him, participates in His life. This is an implicit theology of theosis (divinization) — the soul made like God by acting as God acts. The title "Most High" (Hypsístos) echoes the Psalms and Daniel, where it designates God's absolute sovereignty and transcendence, making the gift of divine filiation all the more staggering.
"For he is kind toward the unthankful and evil"
This clause is the theological foundation of the entire ethics of enemy-love. God does not restrict His chrēstós (kindness, goodness) to the deserving. The "unthankful" () and the "evil" () receive the same rain, sun, and providential care as the righteous — a truth Matthew's parallel (5:45) makes explicit. Luke's formulation is starker: it focuses not on natural phenomena but on the sheer character of God as one who gives without calculating merit. This divine "style" of benevolence is the model — and the theological justification — for the Christian disciple's love of enemies.