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An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

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Intertextuality Pair

Luke 6:27 → Leviticus 19:18

Allusion

Later text

Luke 6:27BSB

But to those of you who will listen, I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,

Earlier text

Leviticus 19:18BSB

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

+ 1 more earlier text

Earlier text

Proverbs 25:21-22BSB

If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you.

Significance

Luke 6:27 opens the love-your-enemies section of the Sermon on the Plain: "But to those of you who will listen, I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." The command Jesus is extending is Leviticus 19:18, "love your neighbor as yourself" — the very text he elsewhere pairs with the Shema as the summary of the Law (Luke 10:27), and the text whose scope the lawyer immediately tries to narrow ("And who is my neighbor?"). Luke 6:27 answers that narrowing in advance by naming the hardest possible neighbor: the enemy. Behind the concrete practice stands Proverbs 25:21-22, "if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink" — the passage Paul quotes when he issues the same command (Romans 12:20). And behind the motive stands Leviticus 19:2, "be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am holy," which Luke's version of the climax reshapes into "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36).

Found via: No public domain commentary confirmation available
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Analogy

That last move is where the passage stops being an ethical demand and becomes gospel. The reason given for loving enemies is not that it works, or that it is noble, but that it is what God is like: "He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked" (Luke 6:35). The command describes the character of the One who has already loved His enemies — and every reader was one. Sons of the Most High act like their Father because they have been treated by Him exactly this way first; the love commanded in Leviticus is unveiled at the cross, where the neighbor-love owed to God's people is poured out on God's enemies to make them sons.

▸ Love Your Neighbor

Luke 6:27 → Leviticus 19:18

Significance

Related Anchor-Text Networks