Fr.
David Curry
Jesus said, “Love your enemies”
It is a moral
imperative. Like so many of the moral imperatives of the gospel, it signals
what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility.
How can we we
be commanded to do what we ourselves cannot do? Because God makes
possible what is humanly impossible. I n the commandment to “love your
enemies” we see the real force and character of love, its truth, its
reason. We are shaken out of the soft sentimentalities of our
inconstant hearts. We are shaken into the strong desiring of the love
of God; “pour into our hearts such love toward thee”, we pray in the
Collect.
The radical,
uncompromising and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what
is indeed beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to
raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised
from the dead dieth no more”.... so “likewise reckon ye also
yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus
Christ our Lord”. What is commanded by God for man is accomplished
in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realised in us by the
quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were
baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?”... that being
“with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness
of his resurrection”.
If we were
simply commanded to do what cannot be done, then we would be left with the
contradiction of the Old Testament. There would be our wanting what we
cannot realise. We would know what is true and right but which we
cannot attain. There would simply be our futility. The
contradiction is only overcome in Jesus Christ. And it is overcome at
the most extreme moment of division and tension. Only so can this
moral imperative to love your enemies make any possible sense. What is
the overcoming? It is the demonstration and the realisation of the
love of God for us in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “While we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us”, the righteous for the unrighteous.
You see, we are
all divided in our loves. Those whom we love the most we hurt the
most. We can hardly love ourselves, our families, our friends, let
alone God, let alone our enemies. “The good that I would I do not;
the evil that I would not do that do I do”. And yet to love and to
love even our enemies is what God commands because this is what God makes
possible.
And he makes it
possible humanly. It belongs to the truth of our humanity that we
should be commanded to love our enemies; in other words, to look beyond the
enmities in our souls, our families, our communities, even our churches.
Jesus Christ shows us the truth of our humanity in unity with divinity.
He is that unity, that perfect and divine mediation between God and man,
between where we want to be and where we find ourselves in our enmity
against God, against one another, and against ourselves. You see, we
are the enemies whom God loves. “God so loved the world that he
gave his only-begotten Son”... “while we were yet sinners”, while
we were yet enemies.
To love our
enemies is to place them - whomever they and we might be, the enemies that
are ourselves in the disarray of our sins - in the compassionate love of God
in Jesus Christ. He who is the Word and Son of the Father shows us the
deep logic and reason of love, its perfect and perfecting power. He
commands that his love be the ruling principle in our lives. He
commands us to what is possible but only in him, only by the quality of our
lives and our loves as rooted and grounded in the free and self-giving love
of God, the love that is the communion of the Blessed and Holy Trinity.
To love your
enemies is to know them in Christ, to know them in the love of him who on
the cross prays “Father, forgive them”. It means to see
ourselves and one another in the motion of God’s love towards us. Such
is the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His
death and resurrection is given to be the pattern of our lives, our lives in
him, in Christ. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves” - know
yourselves in Christ and in him “love your enemies”.
Jesus said, “Love your
enemies”
