(Audio)
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
Jesus calls us to have hearts like the heart of the Father and like his own heart. The Father demonstrated their love in that "while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son" (see Romans 5:10). We learn from God that loving our enemies is something different and less passive than simply ignoring our enemies and giving them a width berth.
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Jesus was the Son who rose for the bad and the good. There were people who were exceptionally guilty sinners, but Jesus died and rose for them as much as anyone else. The Holy Spirit came in power and rained down on believers regardless of their merits or lack thereof. Jesus demonstrated an active missionary love. It was a love that overcame divisions, that sought out the isolated, and that worked to reconcile and make one. It was not content to stop only with the known, the familiar, or the comfortable.
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
It is easy to hear Jesus preach about loving our enemies and think that it is good advice for someone else. After all, we aren't the ones with enemies, right? But maybe this current moment in politics can help us to see that there are people to whom we don't readily direct our love. There are certainly groups that we choose to ignore, whose sufferings we choose not to see. And we are called to be more active in our work toward unity with such groups.
However, there is another temptation now, as regards enemies. We might be tempted to see corrupt police or racists as outside the bounds of those deserving our love, outside the possibility of conversion and reconciliation. Make no mistake, people like these are definitely acting as enemies. But what that means is not that we must destroy them but rather that we must love them. We must love them too much indeed to allow them to continue to act in the manner of enemies. Even as we take bold action against the corrupt and sinful behavior we must remember that we are ultimately called to love them. If this feels like a challenge it should. We can't do it without grace.
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
The LORD was furious with the injustice of Ahab, furious all the more because he was a leader and the injustice he commited was also scandal, and had the result of "leading Israel into sin" by his bad example. Yet the justice the LORD decreed for Ahab was not aimed simply at punishing him in order to balance the scales. It included this, but it also created the conditions under which Ahab repented, under which his soul was saved.
“Have you seen that Ahab has humbled himself before me?
Since he has humbled himself before me,
I will not bring the evil in his time.
I will bring the evil upon his house during the reign of his son.”
We are called to love as the Father loves, to be perfect as our Father is perfect. And this means we need to ask him to make us aware of our blind spots, to show us those whom we do not treat as worthy of our love, even if we don't explicitly acknowledge it. We need his strength to go forth on a mission in which there are no enemies who aren't meant to become friends gathered around the table together.
As we strive to embrace the LORD's mission we may realize that we ourselves have been enemies of God and of others in different ways. But the good news about embracing this mission is we see that, just as much as others qualify for God's mercy and love in spite of themselves, so too do we.
Turn away your face from my sins,
and blot out all my guilt.
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