You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
Of course no one in the modern world admits to having enemies. We're too nice, too civil for that. But the trouble is that we are still highly selective about those to whom we will act with love. We tend to have a blindspot toward many with whom we interact with and hear about day to day, since they are not family of friends. Especially if such people do things that disrespect us, hurt others, or cause damage to the social order, it is all to easy to recuse ourselves from responsibility to love them. How do we respond when we are cut off in traffic? How do we respond when someone's music is too loud, or his political signs are different from ours? What if he acts in a racist or otherwise bigoted way? Do we begin to treat them as enemies in all but name, or do we continue acting and praying with good will toward them?
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
What is often revealed when we look at who we are willing to love is that we are still mostly acting for our own sakes. We are only interested in love to the extent that we can get something out of it, even if that is only a reciprocity of good feeling.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Love that must be bought isn't true love. It isn't even really the love we see in families. Families continue to love one another even if one member acts in a way that is not loving or destructive. We are meant to have such a love, one which is not mercantile, on a broader scale than just our families. One of the reasons the family is so important is precisely because it is a school where we learn this love whereby we love other as other for their own sake.
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
A good start to putting this teaching into practice is by learning to greet those whom we would more typically and easily ignore. If we see them and take that initial positive step of a word and a smile this will amount to more progress in love that it would seem. We can grow it into more love over time if the Lord gives us the opportunity to do so.
I say this not by way of command,
but to test the genuineness of your love
by your concern for others.
Paul knew that he could not command genuine love from the Corinthians. Love is simply not transactional in that way. It is not something that could be limited to the mere satisfaction of the communities' sense of obligation to Paul. Such a fulfillment wouldn't have even by much in the way of love for Paul, let alone toward the community for whom this collection was being taken up. Paul was not content with such a response because his concern was fundamentally aligned with that of Jesus. He wanted the Corinthians to be able to give freely, not based on what they themselves could get out of it, even if that was something as simple as the sense of an obligation fulfilled. Somehow, the more free was the gift, the more closely the giver would become like Jesus himself.
For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that for your sake he became poor although he was rich,
so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Jesus was not obligated to do what he did, and stood to gain nothing from it. But he did it out of a love that was not limited to a specific group, but overflowed, precisely because of the freedom with which it was given, to all times and all places. It enriched all who would receive it and enabled them to become generous and loving in turn, "perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect."
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