Matthew 5:46

This verse comes from the Sermon on the Mount — a long, landmark teaching Jesus gave on a hillside, recorded in Matthew chapters 5 through 7, where he described a radically different way of living for his followers. In first-century Jewish society, tax collectors were widely despised. They were Jewish men who worked for the Roman occupying government, collecting taxes from their own people — and frequently overcharging them to pocket the surplus. They were seen as traitors and moral failures, the lowest rung of the social ladder. Jesus is making a deliberately sharp comparison: if your love only extends to people who already love you back, you haven't done anything the most disreputable person in town isn't already doing.

Jesus, you loved people who betrayed, mocked, and abandoned you — and you ask me to do the same in my smaller, ordinary ways. I can't do that on my own. Soften what's hardened in me toward the people I find it hardest to love, and give me the courage to act anyway. Amen.

It stings a little, doesn't it? Jesus doesn't ease you into this one. He just says it plainly: loving people who love you back isn't a virtue — it's basic human instinct. Even the people his audience despised most could manage that. The tax collector who cheated your neighbor still had friends he'd die for. If your love has the same shape as everyone else's love — conditional, comfortable, confined to people who return it — Jesus is asking what, exactly, sets you apart. Think about the person who is hardest for you to love right now. The family member who said something unforgivable at the dinner table. The friend who vanished when you needed them most. The colleague who quietly undermines you. Jesus isn't asking you to pretend the hurt isn't real or that the wrong didn't happen. He's asking something harder: can your love reach further than your wounds? That's not a personality trait — that's a miracle. And miracles require asking for help.