When Jesus told a crowd on a hillside to love their enemies, he was not adding one more kind rule to an old religion. He was showing them a Father who takes no side between tribes, and who never asks anyone to kill for him. He was born into a world of many gods, where the stories that lasted were the ones the winners wrote down.
A world full of gods
For most of history, people did not ask whether God was real. They asked whose god was stronger. Each people had its own god, the same way it had its own king. So when two peoples went to war, everyone believed their gods were at war too.
In the land where Jesus would later walk, one of the best-loved gods was Baal. He was the storm god of that land. Farmers prayed to him for rain, because when the rain did not come, the wheat died and the children went hungry.
The feast in Samaria
About eight hundred and forty years before Christ, the kingdom of Israel in the north had its capital at Samaria. A soldier there named Jehu, who led the king's chariots, made himself king by killing the old king's whole family. Then he turned to the people who prayed to Baal.
Jehu pretended to love Baal, and he called a great feast in Baal's temple in Samaria. The room filled from wall to wall. Jehu had the room searched so that no one who prayed to his own God was inside, and he set eighty men at the doors. When the offerings were done, the guards went in and killed everyone in the room. Then they tore the temple down and made it into a public toilet.
The book of Kings, an old history of those kingdoms, tells this story with pride, to show how much Jehu loved his God. It says nothing at all about the wives and children who waited at home that night for men who never came back.
The same story on the other side
The people of Moab lived across the Jordan River to the east, and they told stories just like it about their own god, Chemosh. Their king, a man named Mesha, carved his story on a black stone that still survives. On it he says Chemosh told him to take a town from Israel. He says he killed all seven thousand people in it and gave them to his god. Moab's god "commanded" a massacre of Israelites, the mirror image of the stories in Kings.
Love your enemies
Then Jesus came. The Gospel of Matthew tells what he said on a hillside in Galilee.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
Matthew 5:44 · King James Version
He lived it, too. The Gospel of Luke tells how a village in Samaria would not let him stay the night. Two of his closest friends were the brothers James and John, and they asked if they should call fire down from the sky to burn it. Jesus turned around and stopped them, and they all walked on to another village.
Jehu locked the doors of a temple in Samaria and killed everyone inside, and he called it love for God. Jesus was turned away at the door of a village in Samaria, and he would not let anyone burn it. For thousands of years people had believed that the highest God made killing right when it was done in his name. Jesus refused blood and revenge, and he would not harm anyone, inside his own people or outside it. The God he showed us is not the God of Jehu's boast.
Maybe you were taught that God is on one side, and you always felt a little afraid of him. You were right to feel that he did not sound like Jesus. Jesus showed a Father who knows the name of every child in Samaria, even the ones nobody wrote down, and he knows your name too.
Read the full teaching
This is the heart of the first lesson in the series Many gods before and after Jesus. The full teaching tells the whole story of Baal and Jehu, and of Elijah, a prophet who spoke for Israel's God, and how the words of Jesus lived on after him.