Loving your enemies

Why do we have to love our enemies? First of all, because it is a divine precept. Christ himself, in the gospel of St. Matthew, said it very clearly:

"You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you." (5,44)

Not contented with that, Jesus offers a reason: "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends his rain on the just and the unjust." (5,45)

So it seems that God who perfectly knows who is good and bad, who is just and unjust, remains to be indiscriminatingly good to everyone.

He is not good only to those who are good to Him, and bad to those who are bad to Him. He is simply and unconditionally good to all, period.

This is sometimes what is hard for us to do, because our loving is often conditioned to our receiving something in return from others. It is a loving with strings attached.

This goodness, which is what love really is, actually distinguishes us from other creatures and identifies us as true children of God. We are simply not some smart, clever creatures. We are God's children, made in his image and likeness.

Besides, it would seem that our Lord makes this ability to love our enemies as a sign of perfection, because he concludes this clarification by saying: "You therefore are to be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." (5,48)

So human perfection is not so much that one does a very good and perfect job. If that were so, the bees that can make their hives more perfectly than we can build our homes, would be more perfect than us.

Rather, hold your breath, our human perfection is in loving our enemies. In this respect, no other earthly creature can do it, much less, outdo us. It is only reserved for us.

Having said that, we can actually find many reasons why we should love our enemies.

We have to love them, because in the end we are all men and women, brothers and sisters of each other.

No differences, no conflicts among ourselves, no matter how grave, can change or erase that. We have to be constantly on the guard against succumbing to bitter zeal.

We have to avoid being so eaten up by our passions and anger that we forget this fundamental truth about ourselves. We have to learn how to keep cool and calm even amid very trying conflicts.

We are meant for loving. We are designed for that. But we have to go all the way, to its perfecting component which is loving our enemies, forgiving them, even up to death.

This is what Christ showed us. Notice how the narration of the culminating part of his redemptive work-his passion and death-starts.

It's in St. John: "Jesus, knowing that the hour had come for Him to pass out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end." (13,1)

This kind of loving is what is needed nowadays. We have to move from simply being goody-goody. We have to incarnate this ideal of love, for this is now the call of our times.

With all the differences and conflicts we have in our human affairs, we need to remain always within the orbit of charity.

Thus, we need to have restraint in our impulses, rectitude in our intentions, refinement in our speech and deeds, goodwill, prudent actions, quickness to forgive, slowness to anger, discretion, etc.

It pains me to hear, especially now in our politics, so much fault-finding, carping, whining, taunting, twitting, complaining, etc., and done mostly by our young politicians. Can we ever imagine Christ behaving like this?

There seems to be so much credit-grabbing, self-righteousness, intrigue-sowing, all contributing to the pollution of our environment in general.

Let us hope and pray that we can get past this ugly stage of our political life soonest. We are going backward, not forward, with these antics. Let us learn to love our enemies. With God's grace, with our effort, we surely can do it.

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