Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 20, 2022: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

What does it take to love extravagantly? 

    God loves God’s creation extravagantly, in spite of our sin. Psalm 103 reminds us of all his benefits, not the least of which are his kindness and compassion, mercy and graciousness. But are human beings capable of loving so extravagantly? In the First Book of Samuel, King Saul seeks to harm his son-in-law David, picking three thousand men to search for him in the desert. But when night falls, and Saul and his men fall asleep, David has the opportunity to get rid of Saul, yet he refuses to do so. He will later tell Saul, Today, though the Lord delivered you into my grasp, I would not harm the Lord’s anointed. By showing mercy to his adversary, David demonstrates that he can love extravagantly, striving to love as God loves. 

    In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus will make his request clear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. It’s not enough to refrain from harm; Jesus calls upon us to love actively, renouncing enmity, and demonstrating that we too are capable of loving extravagantly if we strive to love as God loves. If such love requires transformation, so be it, for only by loving our enemies—tangibly revealing God’s love by acts of mercy—can we be children of the Most High. We must, as Paul tells the Corinthians, bear the image of the heavenly one, Jesus, who extravagantly showed his love for us all when he died on the cross, loving those who mistreated him and put him to death. That we love extravagantly is a big ask, but one the Lord clearly believes we are capable of, so long as we possess the Spirit of the risen Christ. 

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Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 23, 2020: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

How do we live out holiness in the context of community?

  Already in the Torah, God is preoccupied with the holiness of community.  In the Book of Leviticus, God instructs Moses to tell the whole Israelite community that they shall not bear hatred for their brother or their sister in their heart.  Instead, he says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  To follow the precepts of the Lord, to participate in the life he calls you to, is to be holy, and these particular precepts tie us to our community in the most significant of ways.  God calls us to a holiness firmly grounded in the context of community.  In Psalm 103, the psalmist understands all of the blessings he has received – pardon, healing, redemption, kindness, compassion, mercy and more – within the context of community.  To know that God loves us and blesses us allows us to love God and to love all:  this is the essence of community.

  If Leviticus says we are to find holiness in the context of each other, then Paul’s statement to the Corinthians – you are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you – explicitly equates the people with the body as a whole; to destroy the temple would be to destroy the bonds of community.  And our identity comes from that context of community:  community belongs to Christ and Christ to God.  It’s not up to one or the other to consider himself wise, but for all to belong to each other, even those who seem to fall outside the limits of what we define as our community.  If we follow the dictums of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, we are to love our neighbors but also our enemies!  We must bring grace where there isn’t any; we must bring good where there’s evil, rather than increase the evil in the world.  In the context of community, such attention to grace is absolutely necessary.  If we are, as Jesus states, children of our heavenly Father, we know the infinite love that is ours; to know that infinite love should engender the same love in us for others – all others.  If God cares about our enemies so much, loving them as he loves us, who are we to do anything differently?  Community, Jesus is saying, is always bigger, greater, larger than our narrow confines – and in it, we are called to be holy, perfect, just as our heavenly Father is perfect, in love. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

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Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 24, 2019: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

How do we rise above enmity and promote justice?

  In the First Book of Samuel, David has more than one opportunity to kill his enemy Saul.  On one occasion, David enters Saul’s camp and finds Saul lying asleep with his spear thrust into the ground at his head.  Rather than act on this opportunity, however, David merely takes Saul’s spear and water jug, demonstrating his justice and faithfulness to God while yet asserting his superior position over Saul.  Knowing that Saul is the Lord’s anointed, David chooses not to have Saul’s blood on his hands, opting to remain in right relationship with God instead.  Psalm 103 tells us that merciful and gracious is the Lord; David likewise elects to be merciful, demonstrating forbearance and remaining open to God’s will.

  David may spare Saul out of concern for the Lord’s anointed, but in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus suggests a posture toward our enemies that is even more radical:  Jesus calls upon his disciples not just to love each other, but to love their enemies, and to pray for those who persecute them.  For Jesus’ audience, the disciples, the word enemies brings to mind first and foremost their Roman oppressors.  Jesus is thus challenging the disciples to love and pray for the very people who occupy their land, tax them heavily, treat them with violence & injustice; the disciples are to meet injustice with justice and faithfulness.  It is a challenge we continue to face today whenever we are confronted with injustice in our world.

  In effect, Jesus’ teaching calls us to work to break through our own limitations, to take down any walls we erect separating those we love from those we don’t, so that love can flow from us to all people.  We are to be merciful in the model and image of the heavenly one, as Paul calls Jesus in his letter to the Corinthians, conforming to Jesus’ teaching of love and mercy in ways that are life-giving.  In essence, Jesus is calling us to allow God’s power in us to help us rise above any insult, injury, or persecution, embracing even those who seek to harm us, trying to match our love to God’s love, trying to enter into the depth of God’s love for all.  Only that love can banish all enmity, as it brings the world into one community, united in mercy and compassion, with justice as its goal.

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