‘Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you’

7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: 1 Sm 26:2, 7–9, 12–13, 22–25
Second Reading: 1 Cor 15:45–49
Gospel Reading: Lk 6:27–38 

In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus utters the heart of his teaching: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse you.”

He gives practical examples: “If anyone strikes you on one cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”

The First Reading offers another example. David must have been tempted to think that Saul deserved death and that in killing him he would be doing God and the world a favour. However, David understood what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: that the “path of charity”—that is, “the love of God and of neighbour”—is “the often narrow path between the cowardice which gives in to evil and the violence which, under the illusion of fighting evil, only makes it worse.”

“Charity,” or, in Greek, agape, “respects others and their rights,” the Catechism says. “It requires the practice of justice, and it alone makes us capable of it.” Agape “inspires a life of self-giving: whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.”

God’s ways are not our ways. As St. Paul says in the Second Reading: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

By “love,” we usually mean a natural (“perishable”) love: affection, friendship, or eros (the love that expresses itself sexually). We feel these loves toward a few people only.

However, agape is a supernatural love. It consists not of feelings but of willed behaviour. God made us capable of this behaviour when he bestowed supernatural life on us in baptism.

Paradoxically, C.S. Lewis noted that if we try to love all people with this kind of love, we find ourselves loving them naturally more and more and loving naturally more and more people.

Even by simply praying for our enemies, we find that Lewis is right, and we can see from history that if we injure them, even when, by human standards, they deserve it, we find ourselves hating them more.

Christ himself loves us with agape, for he “died out of love for us, while we were still enemies,” says the Catechism. “The Lord asks us to love” our enemies even as he does: “to make ourselves the neighbours of those farthest away, and to love children and the poor as Christ himself.”

Agape is the kind of love that exists in the Holy Trinity, said Pope St. John Paul II. “In his intimate life, God is love, the essential love shared by the three divine Persons.” In fact, the Holy Spirit is the “personal expression” of this love: “he is person-love. He is person-gift.”

In God’s relation to us, the Pope said, the Holy Spirit is the giver of “the gift of existence to all things through creation, the gift of grace to human beings through the whole economy of salvation,” by which he makes us capable of agape. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

“Love your enemies,” Jesus said; “do good and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High.”

Loving others with the love of the Holy Trinity, the love that Jesus commands, we stand before God not as slaves, in servile fear, nor as mercenaries looking for wages, but as sons and daughters, the Catechism explains. “If we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love for him who commands … we are in the position of children.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2–4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m.–noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Death and the End of the World.

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