Today's Gospel is one of the most difficult to swallow: "Love your enemies." "Pray for those who persecute you."
My dear friends, the unusual command of Jesus raises not only a challenge but a problem, a crucial problem, for it focuses on the core of Christianity. It highlights a critical word - Love.
Let's try to reflect on three trouble areas: 1) the word "Love," 2) the love Jesus preached, and 3) our own love of the enemy.
First, the word "Love" can mean so many things today: "Love" is a golden wedding jubilee. "Love" is a one-night-stand stimulated by drugs or alcohol. "Love" is a baby born of total self-giving. "Love" is safe sex among teenagers. "Love" is lustful pleasure between pre-marital, extra-marital partners. "Love" is pornographic power and exploitation. "Love" is God giving a Son to a cross for us.
We love French poodle. We love Porche sports car. Another way of saying goodbye is "Love ya."
Love indeed is difficult to define. But perhaps we can look at what Christianity has contributed to the meaning of love. If I want to learn the inner essence of love, it would do well to look first to God: a) who God is, and b) what God has done.
Who is God? In the First Letter of John, we find "God is Love" (1 John4:8).
God's secret life reveals a loving community of three Divine Persons, wherein there is indeed I-and-thou, three distinct Persons, but never mine and thine, only one God.
What has God done? God's outreach reveals a powerful God who shaped the universe to mirror divine love, an imaginative God who fashioned man and woman to image God's love, a compassionate God who gave an only Son to a bloody cross not from necessity but from an excess of love, not for a select few but for every man and woman from Adam to end of the world. A Roman Catholic tradition sees a twin force in love, whether human love or divine.
On the one hand, love is a centripetal force. Love makes for oneness; the lover produces another self. On the other hand, love is a centrifugal force: Loves makes for ecstasy; love carries the lover outside himself, outside herself; the lover becomes self-less. Such is love divine; such should be love that is genuinely human.
Now, let us move over to Jesus, to the love Jesus preached. Jesus loved the Law of Moses, the Torah. He grew up with it. He quoted from it.
Back in the early days of Jewish-Christian era, Rabbi Akiba, a remarkable scholar and saint, claimed that the whole Jewish Law was summed up in a single verse from Leviticus: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev19:18). For him, the purpose of the law was to teach love of neighbor - a love that had to be taught, had to be commanded, because no blood relation links us to the man and woman next door.
More than that Rabbi Akiba was martyred by the Romans because he refused to stop teaching the Torah. As he was being executed, he said he now knew the meaning of the verse "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." (Deut 6:5).
It means you are to love God even if God takes your life. It is this kind of love that Jesus preached - preached it from his Jewish background and from his unique intimacy with his Father. When the Pharisee asked him, "Which commandment of the law is the greatest?" His answer was "Love God with all your heart, soul and mind." Then he added a second commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
This commandment is like the first in Mt. 22:34-39. Loving your neighbor is like loving God. Not to love the human images of God is not to love God. More than that, Jesus made it clear who the "neighbor" was - not only the family next door, not only the kababayan (town mates) or fellow Jews, or those who are kind and friendly, but also his relatives who thought he was out of his mind.
Not only Lazarus and his sisters who serve him tasty meals, but also the sinful woman who bathed his feet with her tears, the paralytic, the despised tax-collectors, the lepers ostracized from society. And then that sentence which must have confused his listeners, "Love your enemies, pray for your persecutors" (Mt.5:44). This is the clear command of Jesus to love.
To love Pilate? Love Herod who tried to exterminate him? And Herod who decapitated John the Baptist? Did Jesus actually love the Roman masters? The answer is - yes, indeed!
But to grasp its inner meaning we must move over to ourselves - to ourselves and the enemy that is "not me." All the bombardment of pop songs and printed media talks of love - a romantic feeling, an emotion leading to union of body and soul, of chemistry of longing and desires - not a word about a kind of love that centuries ago Rabbi Akiba realized that had to be taught, had to be learned, because in those instance no blood ties, no chemistry, link us to the other; because the only ties are our common humanity, the redemption of all of us by a God-man on a bloody cross, and the fact that, despite sin, God's image can never be totally erased in any human.
Of such realities is fashioned a Christian love of enemies. Not an easy love. Not what love of friendship means. We are attached to each other, we feel affection for each other, are united in soul - what Augustine of Hippo called "one soul in two bodies."
It is not identical with forgiveness: I must somehow love terrorists who bombed a bus filled with children, even if it makes no sense to forgive them while they still celebrate in their bloody deeds. What, then, am I like - when I love those who hate me?
Christian Love is profound respect for life. So deep a respect that no man's death, no woman's death, is an unqualified blessing, a good thing in every way.
It goes back to God's own declaration in the book of Ezekiel: "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his ways and live" (Ezek 33:11) .
It is a respect for life that molds every Christian into a man or woman of compassion. Compassion! I "suffer with" those who hate me, who seek my life. And I pray for them, pray that they may turn from their ways and live.
I hate what they do: I do not hate those who do it - the rapists, the terrorists, the serial killers, the dishonest and corrupt officials. Again, this love must be taught, I must learn. It is not inherited.
But the learning process is both tough and challenging. And when reason fails to sway me, when I see no trace whatsoever of the image of Christ in the other, then I love those who hate me, who destroy my dear ones, who starve the world's children, simply because Jesus tells me to.
But learning from Jesus is not sheer obedience to a command. In Jesus I see with my own eyes, hear with my own ears, love of enemies in action - I stand beneath the cross and hear a God-man murmur through blood-stained lips, "Father, forgive them" (Lk 23:34). Forgive whom? Not only Herod who treated him with contempt, and Pilate who handed him to be crucified; not only the leaders who ridiculed him and the soldiers who mocked him, and the criminal who derided him.
In the words of St. Paul: "… while we were still enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of God's Son" (Rom 5:10).
A sobering thought: The enemy is not totally "out there." We - all men and women from Eden on - we are the enemy transformed by Christ's love. With that in mind, dare we still divide the world between "us" and "them?" Can we possibly play Christ in our little world if we do not struggle to imitate the Christ of Calvary?
Here we find the "good news" indeed. What makes love of enemy possible in my life as well as in Christ's is not my intelligence. It is the God of compassion active within me, the God who is Compassion, the God who, according to the Psalmist, "does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities" (Ps 103:10).
The grace to love our enemies is there for us - even the grace to obtain the grace. Once again, very simply, "with God all things are possible" (Mt. 19:26)
A new patient walked into the office of the famous psychiatrist Dr. Smiley Blanton. The patient noticed a copy of the Bible on Dr. Blanton's desk.
"Don't tell me that the great Dr. Blanton reads the Bible," said the patient.
"I not only read the Bible," replied Dr. Blanton, "I meditate on it. It's the greatest textbook on human behavior ever written. If only people followed its teaching, a lot of psychiatrists could close their clinics and go fishing."
At the Operating Room during my recent eye operation, I was surprised when Dr. Cimafranca asked me if I could lead the prayer. I was already strapped on the operating table and half-conscious with the anesthesia. I answered with embarrassment that I was in no condition to lead a prayer. He then led everybody in the Operating Room in a beautiful prayer.
Later, in one of my post-operation visits, I told him that I was glad and impressed that he led the prayer before the operation. He told me that he always did it before an operation, either with the staff, or by himself.
That's the kind of doctor I like - an instrument joined with God. That's the best guarantee one can find!