You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
This was not specifically stated in Scripture. But it was inferred from the fact that only love of one's neighbor was directly commanded. It made sense to them when the command was given, when their enemies were opposing armies. It made sense to Jesus' contemporaries in his own age, when their enemies were the Roman occupying force. It still makes sense to many people in our own day, whether it is nations or rival political factions who oppose us. Everyone seemed to believe that loving others meant accepting their beliefs and supporting their cause. People still have trouble with the idea of hating the sin and loving the sinner. Many are so deeply defined by the causes they support that disentangling the person from the ideology is often difficult, especially when they themselves insist it is that ideology that makes them who they are.
But I say to you, love your enemies,
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father
Jesus called his followers to love their enemies, not by helping them win or to further subjugate them, but by continuing to treat them, in spite of their hostility, as valuable creatures made in the image of God. They were often required to not assist their enemies with what they did. But they were to respond to the people themselves with prayer and greeting, with willing their good and showing them the common courtesy that all people deserve. Sometimes this would succeed in changing hearts when meeting hostility with hostility never could. People would wonder at the courtesy and good will shown to them in spite of what they did. This was actually something so deeply difficult and uncharacteristic of humans that it appeared miraculous with those who were not accustomed to it. We think here of the ways in which Christian forgiveness still gets the attention of the secular world, whether John Paul the Great forgiving his potential assassin, or the Amish forgiving the shooter who killed five young girls from their community. As enemies go, such perpetrators of murder and attempted murder match the definition more closely than most. And this is why their forgiveness was so remarkable and characteristically Christian.
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust
God himself loved us while we were still sinners, still hostile to his ways, still enemies. He sent Jesus into a world that literally rejected and crucified him. He did this because he loved with perfect love that could neither be purchased or squandered, that was steadfast and entirely unselfish. Before the incarnation we might have held out that God did so only because he was immune from the aggression of his enemies. He loved because he had unlimited resources and absolute safety. And so Jesus became one of us, among other reasons, to show that this sort of agape love was appropriate for humans as well, and was in fact the apex of who they were meant to become. He was anything but invulnerable and he did not avail himself of limitless divine resources. Love as reciprocity was not difficult, but neither was it very impressive. It didn't reach much beyond justice, and was sometimes much more selfishly motivated than that. Jesus called his listeners to more than merely greeting others for the sake of being greeted ourselves, or of loving others in order to receive something in return.
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
The Old Testament called the people to be holy as God was holy. But they might have misinterpreted that to mean a call to separate themselves from all others, even by conquest and violence if necessary. So Jesus clarified by teaching the kind of perfection, proper to God, that he wanted his disciples to imitate. This kind of Godly perfection is what will make us a people peculiar God's own. If we receive any praise, renown, or glory, may it be because we love as God loves. And thus it will not accrue to us, but rather to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment