"You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
When I pray the next few 'Kingdom comes' with this passage in mind, I am generally taking it pretty much at face value. However there are a couple of ways that I tend to take 'enemy' and each affects how I pray in a different way.
I sometimes take 'enemy' personally, that is to say someone who has taken against me [as they say in Yorkshire], in which case I tend to pray with an image of them in mind as I say the phrase "Your kingdom come...", sometimes the prayer will turn to a kind of blessing of them, sometimes a cry that they might repent, sometimes that their hearts might be softened [to use a phrase from an Anglican litany]. There are times when praying this phrase as a kingdom come prayer involves me in reckoning with the way that I have taken against someone, in which case I may also be praying for them to know the kinds of riches that I hope God wants for me.
Enemy can also be national or corporately defined; our governments define enemies. So we must pray for terrorists, drug barons, Osama bin Laden etc; that God's will be done in them, remembering God loves them to and wills to bring them to repentance...
Those who persecute us. Now, I don't [thank God] suffer much persecution. But we in the church universal /catholic do. So sometimes I find myself remembering Christians under pressure for their profession of faith as I pray "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven...."
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Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:43-44: On Del.icio.us: hate, love, spirituality, paternoster, prayerbeads, enemy, Kingdom_of_God
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