For if you love those who love you,
what credit is that to you?
We are called beyond a mercenary love. That sort of love is concerned more with what one hopes to get rather than what he can give. We are called to learn to will the good of the other as other. To love one's enemies sounds lovely. But having heard the call so often we forget just how impossible it is without grace.
But rather, love your enemies and do good to them,
and lend expecting nothing back;
then your reward will be great
and you will be children of the Most High,
for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
We will be children of the Most High when we love our enemies because can only be by the power of his life in us that we do so. How else shall we untether ourselves from the need for affirmation, the need, at least, for the positive feelings that 'pay' us when we do good deeds? To work without this direct reliance on a system of rewards is impossible unless God himself is our treasure. When we can delight ourselves in God, doing his will does not need to immediately generate reward or positive feelings or good results. There is something deeper, a rightness in knowing that we are doing what is pleasing to him, that can sustain us.
In order to get beyond our need for immediate rewards we need to get beyond our sense of deserving and our sense of self-righteousness. When we imagine ourselves to be in a position to judge others or condemn them we assume that we should earn something by our efforts. But we are unprofitable servants (see Luke 17:10). We don't have anything that we haven't received (see First Corinthians 4:7). We are all dependent on the same mercy and forgiveness of God (see Matthew 18:21-35). No gifts are owed us by God. We cannot repay anything we have been given. Yet he gives more the we can ask or imagine (see Ephesians 3:20). When we learn to forgive, to stop judging, and to give ourselves freely we live as children of the Most High are meant to live, drawing our life from the Father through the Son.
Give and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
We find ourselves when we give ourselves away (see Gaudium et Spes 24). Knowledge comes up short. It puffs up with pride, keeping us at a level of exchange and preventing us from giving freely. It tries to build the self but what it builds cannot be sustained. We need love to build up what truly lasts.
If anyone supposes he knows something,
he does not yet know as he ought to know.
But if one loves God, one is known by him.
If we begin as we are known and loved by God we find ourselves able to avoid judging, to forgive, and to give of ourselves, since we experience our own existence as pure gift and grace.
I give you thanks that I am fearfully, wonderfully made;
wonderful are your works.
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