Starting this past Wednesday, our Gospel readings have been taken from Luke’s presentation of the “Sermon on the Plain”. This sermon is similar to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6-7). Together these two sermons, along with Paul’s letters, help us have a better picture of Jesus’ teachings.
For many people, these passages may be the most difficult passages in the Gospel. They seem to express an idealism that is totally unrealistic and unattainable. We live in a world where the evil one seems to be winning the battle: calls for divisions among people carried relentlessly by the press, by the entertainment industry and in social media; contentious political debates; using our legal systems for litigation against and indictments of public figures; gang murders, political assassinations, violent vendettas; terrorist attacks on the innocent. Are these things not to be avenged?
To understand what Jesus is saying to us, we must put aside our prejudices and assumptions about other people. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.” We may feel that to follow these teachings is to try something that is totally beyond our capacity (which it is, without God’s help), that it would only encourage those people who behave badly to behave even worse. In the Old Testament, hatred of evildoers seems to be the right attitude to have. But Jesus teaches us to extend love to our enemies and to our persecutors. This is the core of Jesus’ teaching, the teachings that he himself practiced.
The first big hurdle for us is the word “love”. “Love” has many meanings for us. The most common meaning implies both affection and intimacy. For us to “love” often means to “be in love with”, to “be attracted to”. But Jesus is not telling us to be in that kind of love with our enemies. He is not even telling us that we need to like our enemies. The Greek verb that the gospel uses is agapao (agape in modern English). Agape is a special kind of love. It is not the physically expressed love of lovers nor is it the love of parents and close friends. It is an attitude of wishing for the well-being of all people.
This is the frequently one-sided love that God has for us. It is a love that does not expect a return. God reaches out to us in an infinite love and God wants every person to experience that love. God wishes us the fullest well-being. It is the kind of love that the father had in the story of the prodigal son. The father continued to love his son even in the boy’s lowest moments of debauchery and degradation. It is the kind of love that Jesus had for the people who nailed him to the cross. He prayed for them, for their being forgiven, that they might come to realize that what they were doing was evil. It is the kind of love that God expects us to have for our enemies. And with God’s grace, this kind of love is not impossible.
Jesus is not at all asking us to do something “unnatural”. We do not naturally want to hate or be hated. We want to love and to be loved. We see many parts of the world where, for years, there has been a cycle of hatred and retaliation in a never-ending spiral of vengeance and loss of life. Jesus knows that the only way to break this cycle is to follow His way. It is not a lose-lose or lose-win; it is a win-win where everyone benefits.
Perhaps words of the late St. Mother Teresa are appropriate here:
“Love, to be true, must hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is no love in me, and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.”
To put Jesus’ teaching into effect is not a matter of strengthening our will to do something very difficult but to change our conventional thinking, at the deepest level, to see things his way. Once we do that, it becomes much easier.
Jesus’ application of this teaching also has been the subject of much mockery. “To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too.” In a world where macho reigns, this is just too much. Only wimps would follow Jesus’ advice because they are afraid to do anything else. In our world, Schwarzenegger and Stallone know what to do. Mow them down with an automatic machine gun!
We, who live in the Kingdom of God, are told to see things through Jesus’ eyes. Turning the other cheek, as it is presented here, is not at all an act of weakness. It requires great courage and great inner strength and an awareness that the one who strikes is the one who is weak. It is easy to lash out at another person by word or act. It is easy to hit back; it is almost an instinctive reaction. Jesus tells us what we already know. To hit back is to reduce oneself to the same level as one’s attacker and it solves nothing in the long run. Deliberately and calmly not hitting back is to refuse to play the other person’s game. It is to break the cycle and change the level of the playing field and move it to a higher level – the level of mutual respect and human dignity.
Jesus set the example when he was struck on the face during his trial. During the whole degradation of the Passion, his dignity shines out in contrast to the pathetic posturing of his judges and tormentors. This is the spirit that guided Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and that is behind all movements devoted to active non-violence.
Jesus next speaks to the qualities of a genuine disciple. Jesus teaches us that the goodness of every disciple comes from within: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit.” The good person, out of the good treasure of their heart, produces good; and the evil person, out of their evil treasure, produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.
Another measure of the good disciple is how he or she listens to and acts upon the words of the Master. To “listen” includes hearing, understanding, accepting, and assimilating into oneself the Master’s teaching and vision. The behavior then follows naturally, spontaneously and, to a large extent, effortlessly.
Such a person is compared to a man who builds his house on a strong foundation. When the floods inevitably come, the house stands firm. On the other hand, the one who listens, but does not take in and so does not act on what he has heard, is like a man who builds his house on a poor foundation. When the inevitable floods come, the house collapses. (Makes me think about the skyscraper in San Francisco—because insufficient detail was put into designing and constructing the building’s foundation, the building now tilts and likely will, in time, collapse.)
This parable needs to be read in the context of the early Church where, in time of persecution, some stood firm because their faith was deeply rooted, while others fell away at the first sign of pressure.
If today, there is no overt persecution of the Christian faith where you live, most of us live in a much more dangerous spiritual environment, an environment not of torture and imprisonment, but of advertising and media hype promising untold happiness and pleasure, where the vision of the Gospel is ignored, irrelevant or actively rejected. We need to have very sure foundations to live in such a world. Without a sure foundation, it is very easy to be enticed away to a life of materialism, consumerism, hedonism, and individualism. Because of their superficial attractiveness and their being indulged in by so many people around us, these things are often far more dangerous to our souls than outright attacks on our faith.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!