Matthew 5:43-48
In May of 1778, the French writer Voltaire was nearing death, and he knew it. Ever the critic of Christianity, or maybe more of the Roman Catholic Church, nevertheless, he welcomed a priest into his quarters while on his deathbed. The priest, just trying to do his, was trying to prepare Voltaire’s soul for death, and he asked him to renounce Satan, to which Voltaire replied, “Now, now, my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”
“But I say to you,” Jesus tells us, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” This is another instance of Jesus being annoyingly God. “But it’s so fun to hate our enemies, Jesus,” we’d like to respond, and do respond, since that’s what most of us do.
“Love your enemies.” I’ve had some enemies over the years, people who were openly hostile to me or to what I represented. I’ve tried not to return evil for evil, to not harbor anger and resentment, with varying degrees of success. As it turns out, I am not up to that task; unlike God, my property is not to always have mercy. In my broken human nature, I don’t want the sun to rise on the evil or the rain to water the fields of the unjust.
“Love your enemies.” Because that sounds well-nigh impossible, let’s consider what love is. According to Thomas Aquinas, love is fundamentally defined as “to will the good of another,” to desire the best for them. To love your enemy, then, is to want for them what you want for yourself: to be a person in right relationship with God and neighbor. It is to pray, as it says in the Great Litany, that it may please God “to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts.” It is to ask and allow God to infuse our hearts with that excellent gift of charity, that divine ability to love the unlovable.
If your initial reaction to that definition of love was “Sure, Jesus, I’ll get right on that,” well, I can relate. We can’t love our enemies by our own power; we can barely love ourselves by our own power. Thankfully, our God knows that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”
That acknowledgement is one of the gifts of the Lenten season. If we have thus far observed a holy Lent, if we have practiced self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and have been reading and meditating on God’s holy Word, then perhaps we have also come to a renewed realization that we are totally dependent on God’s gracious power in all things.
“Love your enemies.” This command of Jesus offers us a lesson in real life and how we are to respond to it. We will have enemies, we will at times be our own worst enemy, but if we respond with love, with grace, with wanting the best for even our enemies, the measure we give will be the measure we get back.
Meditation by the Reverend Matthew J. Tucker
Rector, Christ Church, Bordentown
Diocese of New Jersey