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You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
For those Jews living at the time of Jesus it was easy to identify the enemy: the occupying Roman forces. And though there was nothing in the Law that required hatred of the enemy neither did there seem to be anything against it. In fact, it seemed to be a corollary of concern for the a Law that those opposed to the Law should themselves be opposed.
What of us today? No one speaks of having an enemy outside of video games and movies. But do we not avail ourselves in a similar imagined "blind spot" in the command to love, and concern ourselves particularly with the just, with those who love us, and with our brothers and sisters? Is not our love as so-called Christians not altogether different from that of pagans, closed in on itself, insistent upon reciprocity? After all, we tell ourselves, we can't love everyone equally without exception. And this is in fact the case. But even so, we must consider whom we are excluding, often even without realizing it.
But I say to you, love your enemies,
and pray for those who persecute you
We can't rely on the present goodness of a person to judge whether they merit our active care for them, much less their potential utility to us. If there is to be any hope for the transformation of the world it can only be realized if we do not limit our love in this way, but rather reach out to those most who are most in need and whom, by our unique gifting, we are the most able to help.
Our love is nevertheless called to be genuine love, not just whatever we wish love to mean, just as the Father's love for us is genuine. He does not act as an enabler of sin that can never satisfy, does not validate our misguided self-images as he finds them, but rather elevates us by his love to better paths and to more wholesome ways of thinking about ourselves, others, and our goals.
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
We know not to love a drug addict by giving them drugs, nor a sinner by empowering them to sin, nor even by telling them that their sin is something other than it is. But this does not mean we are free to wash our hands of involvement with them. And herein is the difficult part for us. For precisely what we should do is not always clear to us. To discover it, we need discernment and prayer that look to our heavenly Father as the model, his perfect love as our example.
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
It isn't so much that we are called to go out searching new places for new faces to bless, though perhaps we may do this. Today what we have in the Gospel is more of a call to see the opportunities to love that we have failed to notice in the usual orbit of our lives day-to-day. It is more of a call to recognize that, without calling others our enemies, we have all developed something of a blind spot. We should check it before changing lanes. There is most likely someone like Lazarus on our door whom we have excused ourselves from assisting, maybe because we don't know what we can do for them. Rather than surrendering at the start, let us ask our Father how he wants to make his light rise upon them through us. Let us ask how the living waters of the Spirit might best be shared with those starved for growth.
When we seek to imitate the perfection of our heavenly Father we become the people we were meant to be, peculiarly his own, sacred to him, because he will see within us a reflection of his own heart of love.
Blessed are they whose way is blameless,
who walk in the law of the LORD.
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