The readings we just heard are challenging to say the least.  There is really a lot going on there, especially in the Gospel.  Jesus has been healing many people, healing them of their diseases, casting out unclean spirits, and now they are gathered there to listen.

 

The healings really help the people to want to listen to His moral teachings.  That’s really the point of the healings, two thousand years ago and still today, when someone is healed supernaturally, they are more likely to listen to the moral teachings of the supernatural healer, Jesus Christ.  

 

People encounter Jesus and His love in the healing and will now listen to His teachings and trust Him going forward.

 

An example from the other day, one of my friends came to the mission with a problem with his knee.  Ever since he was 10 years old, he had a gap in his knee, between his knee cap, he could feel this gap, and furthermore it hurt him to kneel.

 

After being prayed over at the mission, my friend kneeled down and realized it didn’t hurt.  Then he felt his knee and realized there was no longer a gap.  For nearly twenty years he has been rubbing his knee and noticing this gap, and now it was gone, God had healed his knee.

 

And what is his response?  “Lord, I am not worthy. I am not worthy of your love.”  But being worthy isn’t part of the equation, God loves us with His supernatural love, and He calls us to do the same, to conform our heart to His, because we bear His image.

 

This is a key to understanding this passage, the supernatural love of God.  God is showing us how He loves while we were still sinners, His “enemies” so to speak, (Rom 5:8-10) and asking us to love like He loves us.  So Jesus here is giving examples of natural love and supernatural love, and He is calling us to love supernaturally.

Let’s look at the first sentence which is the theme of this Gospel, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

Now the immediate reaction that people probably had back then and which, I know people have today, was, “How can I love someone who has hurt me? What does that mean? What does it look like to “love your enemies?”” 

 

This is particularly difficult for us as modern people because in modern English, the word “love” has become so wrapped up with our emotions, our passions, our feelings toward another person. So when we say we love someone, what we mean is that we have “good feelings” towards someone. 

 

It isn’t just that we want good things for that person, but that person makes us happy. That person makes us feel good about ourselves. We enjoy being in their presence. So there tends to be an emphasis on “feelings” when we talk about love — to say nothing of the fact that love is frequently associated with romantic love.

 

But what Jesus is talking about has nothing to do with our feelings, it is first about our actions: “do good to those who hate you.”  Jesus gives some specific actions, turning the other cheek, giving away our coat, and lending without expecting return.  Difficult things to do, no doubt, but specific actions.

 

The second thing Jesus says to do is to speak well of them, to return their curse with a blessing. A blessing there is not just to do good towards somebody, but to speak good to somebody. If someone curses me, they speak evil against me. They’re verbalizing that they would wish harm upon me, that’s what a curse is. So to bless is to verbalize a desire for good upon the person. So if someone curses me, I bless them. That’s the second way to show them that I love them. 

 

A third way, and this one’s really important, “pray for those who mistreat you.” It's very crucial because, whereas the other two seem to imply a certain amount of interaction, this one does not require any interaction. 

One of the things people will often ask me is, “Fr. Andy, how can I love this person who hurt me? I don’t even want to be in their presence.” Or “it’s dangerous for me to be in their presence” or whatever it might be, I always like to stress, “even if you don’t come into contact with someone who’s an enemy, or who hates you, or hurts you, you can always pray for a person.” 

 

And what is the prayer? The prayer is for God to bless that person. You’re asking for good to be done to someone who wishes harm to you; that is “loving your enemies” - praying for those who persecute you - and it’s really, really counter-intuitive. 

 

It’s not going to come natural to you to say, “This person that I’m an enemy with, this person that I hate, I’m going to devote an hour of prayer to them. I’m going to say an entire rosary for this person who betrayed me or hurt me or stole my job,” whatever it might be. 

 

Prayer is an expression of love, because agape, in its deepest sense, agape love is to “will the good of another” - to act in such a way as to bring good to another. 

 

Love is not primarily rooted in our emotions. It’s rooted in the will; it’s rooted in the choices that you make: to do good, to say good, and to pray for your enemies. Those are the three concrete actions that Jesus gives here as He’s unpacking the verb for love, which has to be shocking to those listeners then, probably still to us today.

 

It’s unexpected. It's surprising. It seems irrational, but that’s because it’s not operating according to the logic of this world. It’s the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s the logic of the Son of God, who comes into this world to be struck on the cheek in his Passion, and not to fight back, to be betrayed by nearly everyone including His best friends, yet to pray for them from the cross.

 

This is supernatural love. And it is because we don’t have to be worthy, it never comes into the equation.  In this Gospel, Jesus says what we call the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you. For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.” 

But you can see the way He follows up the Golden Rule is even deeper than we usually think of it ourselves. Jesus is trying to move us from natural thinking, natural love, to supernatural thinking, supernatural love.

 

He makes these distinctions, “And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, and get back the same amount. But rather, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back…”

 

See how he shows the natural love of the world versus the supernatural love of God, the love He expects us to give?  

 

Sometimes people will say, “I should be able to go to heaven, I’m a good person, I didn’t kill anybody.  I do good, I try to love people, I try to love my neighbor” and that’s all good, but Jesus is not calling us to purely natural love. The “I scratch your back if you scratch mine” type of love. We see natural love on display throughout all human cultures and outside of the church.

 

Jesus calls us to something higher as disciples, to love supernaturally like He loves us. If we are able to love like God loves, this is His promise to us, “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. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

 

He loves us as His children, but as His children, we are to imitate Him in love, and we will be rewarded abundantly for showing this love to others, whether they are worthy of it or not never comes into the equation… Because if we are honest with ourselves, there have been times in our lives where we have sinned and made mistakes, but God has still mercifully loved us.  

 

Who are those we consider our enemies?  Take this challenge from Jesus to love them this week, through acts of kindness, through blessing them when we speak to them, through praying for them.  In this way we will make God’s supernatural love present in our world, and receive abundant blessing from God in the process.