“If you come across your enemy’s stray ox or donkey, you must return it to him. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you lying helpless under its load, and you want to refrain from helping it, you must help with it.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I love watching America’s Funniest Videos. I can sit for hours and laugh myself silly watching video after video of people doing crazy things or reacting to things in hilarious ways. The best videos, though, are always the ones in which someone probably gets hurt. There’s just something about a little kid hitting a ball right back into dad’s midsection that you can’t help laughing at. The misfortune of others is an easy thing to laugh at. When the other is someone we consider an enemy, though, the mirth can turn into a bit (or a lot) of schadenfreude. Yet how we treat our enemies matters. God has thoughts about it. Let’s talk about one of those thoughts right here.

Throughout the ages of human history there have been a few ideas that pretty much everyone has agreed upon. There haven’t been many more than that, but at least a few of them have been fairly universal. Not murdering innocent people has tended to make the list. So has not stealing. Another one is that enemies should be treated like enemies. If someone is your enemy, you don’t strive for kindness toward them. You strive to thwart their purposes every chance you get even to the point of using violence if necessary. If you see an opportunity to either do good for an enemy or leave them to suffer, you leave them to suffer every single time. You might even find a way to add to their suffering a bit.

When Jesus gave His famous command for His followers to love their enemies, there’s a reason He introduced the idea the way He did. He said to the crowd, “You have heard that it said, ‘love your neighbor,’ and ‘hate your enemy.'” The first was a direct quote from the Law of Moses; the second was not. The second may have been somewhere in the Talmud (I’d have to look that up), but it certainly wasn’t in the Law. It was a cultural idea and one that was generally shared by every single culture. Except, if Israel had really been paying close attention to the heart of the law so many of them knew so well in word, they might have found what Jesus said next entirely less radical than it perhaps seemed.

After talking about the importance of justice, the next command we find here in chapter 23 is about helping a donkey. On its face that sounds rather odd, but the idea makes more sense. If you find a lost donkey, help it find its way home. If you see a donkey struggling under a heavy load, help bring some relief to it. That seems simple enough, but that wasn’t the whole law or the whole context. You see, this particular donkey that keeps getting in trouble isn’t just some random donkey. It’s not even a donkey that belongs to a friend or family member. This is your enemy’s donkey. Helping this donkey is going to be doing a favor for your enemy.

If you find your enemy’s donkey wandering around by itself, you are to get the donkey under control, and you are to take it back to your enemy. That means you are going to have to go to your enemy’s house. You are going to have to interact with your enemy. He is going to know that you have done this thing for him. He is going to experience you treating him not like the enemy that he is, but like you would a friend. Even if you make fun of him for managing his estate so poorly that the donkey got out in the first place, you’ve still done him a good turn. He is going to remember that.

Kindness, even kindness wrapped in ugliness, is still kindness. It is fundamentally different from ugliness wrapped in kindness. People will see through that kindness to the ugliness on the inside and hate you for it. But for an act of kindness wrapped in ugliness, there’s a good chance they’ll see through the ugliness to the kindness on the inside and appreciate you for it. But if an enemy starts to appreciate you, there’s a chance he might start doing things to move himself out of the category of “enemy” and into the category of “friend.” Who knew that returning a stray donkey to its owner could be such a potentially radical thing to do.

The next part of this command gets even more radical. “If you see the donkey of someone who hates you lying helpless under its load, and you want to refrain from helping it, you must help with it.” So, what’s going on here? Here, you’re walking along and you see a donkey that has been so loaded down with stuff that it has fallen over and can’t get up. That fool of an enemy! Who would be so stupid as to overload a poor donkey like this? Your enemy, of course. Yet while your heart might break a bit for the donkey, this is your enemy’s donkey. You hate your enemy. Helping the donkey is going to be doing a good thing for your enemy. You don’t do good things for enemies; you oppose and harass them. You don’t want to help this donkey get up. That’s your enemy’s job. You want to make fun of your idiot of an enemy for being so stupid and uncaring. This jerk is no better than a governor who shoots puppies.

Yet as much as you want to lean in that direction, God says otherwise. He says you must help. But look at those last two words of v. 5. They seem innocent enough, but they are perhaps the most radical part of the whole thing here. God didn’t simply say the people must help. He didn’t even simply say the people must help it, meaning the donkey. He said the people must help with it. If you’re helping with something, what does that mean? It means there’s another person involved. In this case, the person is your enemy. Now, the command is not merely to do a good deed for your enemy without having to interact very much. The command is to actively help your enemy by working with him to accomplish some task he needs to do but can’t do very well on his own. And while you can say you’re only doing it for the donkey, you’re still doing it.

Notice that in none of this – nor in Jesus command to love our enemies – is the existence of enemies questioned. God doesn’t say we shouldn’t have enemies. He knows we’re going to have enemies. The apostle Paul describes God Himself as having enemies. Enemies exist. That’s simply a function of living in a world broken by sin. What God calls His people to do is not to not have any enemies at all. He calls them – and us as this is an idea that Jesus not only repeats, but extends quite far – to not treat their enemies like enemies. We are to treat our enemies like friends. We are to show them kindness. We are to work with them in accomplishing their goals. We are to love them. We are to pray for and not merely against them.

Why would God do this? For a couple of reasons. The first is practical. When we treat our enemies like this, there’s a chance they are going to move out of the category of enemy for us and into the category of friend. At the very least, there’s a reasonable chance our enemy will cease thinking about us as an enemy when we treat consistently with kindness. And if they stop thinking about us as an enemy, they might stop treating us like an enemy. Having your enemies stop treating you like an enemy in response to your refusing to treat them like an enemy – even when you don’t want to do it – is a pretty convenient thing. And rest assured that when we start doing this, they are going to cynically assume hypocrisy on our part. We would too if the shoe was on the other foot. But even if at first we don’t feel it either, acting like this has the power to change our thinking over time. To put that another way, while belief typically dictates behavior, a consistent behavior in opposition to our belief can start to change our belief.

Ultimately, thinking through a new covenant lens, there are no enemies in God’s kingdom. By giving these kinds of commands, God is inviting us to live like we are in His kingdom now which will consistently make like better not only for us, but for everyone around us including our enemies.

The other reason God called Israel to behave like this and Jesus called His followers to do the same thing on an even greater level by making the whole thing more generalized so that someone couldn’t try to split hairs by arguing that as long as you helped with your enemy’s donkey, you could otherwise treat him like an enemy in everything else since God didn’t say not to, is because this is how He behaves. Operating for the moment on the understanding that an enemy is defined as someone who is working toward an end that is the opposite of the one you are trying to accomplish and whose achievement makes yours more difficult to impossible to achieve, everyone who is not following God is His enemy. Our aim and His are the opposite of one another. We want to increase our glory. He wants to increase His. We want to be sovereign over ourselves. He is sovereign over all of creation. And yet, by the wonder of common grace, God does all kinds of good for us whether we follow Him or even believe in Him or not. Now, we won’t likely recognize His goodness toward us when we are in that state, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

All God is doing here, then, is calling us to treat our enemies just like He treats His. And how does God treat His enemies? The apostle Paul lays that out for us in Romans 5: “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more than, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” God gave up His life for His enemies. Calling us to treat them with kindness and respect and love seems like a pretty small thing in the face of that. When Jesus introduced us to this idea, it wasn’t actually a new one at all. He was simply calling us back to what God’s purposes had been for His people since the beginning. Let’s commit to this end together. The world will be glad that we did.