Gospel Reflections
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
23 February 2025, Church Year C
Reprinted by permission of "The Arlington Catholic Herald"
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This Sunday presents us with one of the most distinctive
and most
difficult teachings of the whole Christian faith: “Love your
enemies, do good
to those who hate you.”
While we might surround this teaching of the Lord with
qualifications
and explain away; such words as “to the person who strikes you
on one cheek,
offer the other one as well” in any number of ways, it is good
for us to
wrestle with Christ’s instruction in its full gravity. The Lord’s call for us
to love extends to
those who cause us pain, and to the wicked, without exception.
It
is a
teaching that runs directly counter to our age of self-advocacy
on the one hand
and demonization of those with whom we disagree on the other. What’s more, it is a
teaching that Christ backs
up with his own action, praying for those in the act of nailing
him to the cross,
saying without resentment or bitterness, “Father, forgive them,
they know not what
they do.”
What
is
the source and meaning of such an act of love?
Is he demanding that we as Christians should give up the
fight for justice
and goodness, stop seeking good order in the world around us,
stop standing up
for ourselves? Is
he demanding that we
collapse in weakness before the evils present in human nature
and action? Certainly
not. Love of
enemies is quite the opposite of
weakness. If we ask
about the foundation
of this love, we will find that it is in fact one of the
greatest signs of
strength in any heart.
The
foundation
of love of enemies is in fact a supernatural outlook and a
confidence
in the eternal and unsleeping justice of God.
Christ is able to ask with compassion, tenderness and
mercy that his
murderers be forgiven because he knows that they do not
represent any
existential danger to him.
He knows who
he is before the father, he knows that the rather will not leave
him in death
and that nothing escapes the father’s vindication. Christ the Son knows
that no one gets away
with anything in the end and will pay for it with either
repentance or
punishment. Seeing
things from the standpoint
of eternal rewards, he prays for the salvation of sinners.
Without
the
need for vengeance, Christ even in his humanity can see the
origin and end
of his enemies; he himself created them good, and longs to bring
them home
reformed and healed. Christ
can also to
love his enemies because his heart is anchored in heaven,
nothing on earth has
ultimate power over him, and he can see the eternal stakes for
these souls he loved
into existence. Love
of enemies
understood righty is an act founded on deep freedom and
unshakable strength.
This
freedom
and this strength is available to us by grace. We too can ask for the
gift of a supernatural
outlook, and practice evaluating things around us from the
standpoint of heaven. Yes,
we pursue what is right, including the
correction of wrongdoing, but never as an act of revenge,
bitterness,
resentment, fear, or desperation.
Those
who hurt us or who do the wrong are themselves going to undergo
the eternal
justice of God, just as we will, without fail.
They too came from God, loved into existence as good. Christ took on the
suffering due for their
sins as much as ours, and he longs for their healing and
entrance into heaven alongside
that of the people we can easily love.
Expanding
our
hearts to include enemies requires real and sometimes painful
conversion,
but it is the path to imitating Christ most perfectly, and
becoming capable of
receiving God’s own unbounded and merciful love for ourselves.