Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you

SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME | 23 FEBRUARY 2025 LUKE 6: 27-38 LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.” Familiarity has deadened our sense of just how extraordinary this startling exhortation is. But it is as counterintuitive and even offensive to common sense now as it was when it was first uttered. It flies in the face of our deepest instincts for self-preservation and our natural solicitude for those closest to us. On the face of it, it sounds like an oxymoronic counsel of self-destruction, an incitement to national or societal suicide, an impression only heightened in our current geopolitical circumstances. The menacing threat of expanding conflict between already divided nations serves only to make these words even more unpalatable. And yet they lie at the very core of the Gospel and, as such, are without doubt both the most challenging and the most revolutionary of all Jesus’ sayings. At a level much deeper than politics or diplomacy, they are nothing less than the key to the world’s peace. But on a more personal level, they entail that only by willing the good of all, without exception, as God does, can we be said genuinely to love him. In human terms, the cost of putting these words into practice is, of course, nothing less than everything. They led Jesus himself directly to the Cross. When the divine love that had created the world became humanly present in the violent, unjust human world that we have fashioned, and to which we all contribute in myriad seemingly minor ways (and sometimes not so minor), the Cross was inevitable: in Herbert McCabe’s memorable words, “If in this life you don’t love, you’re dead; if you do, you will be crucified.”

But humanity’s insane, self-harming reaction to the presence of Goodness Itself among us did not diminish God’s love for us. Jesus continued to love his persecutors: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It was precisely the love to which these words gave expression that liberated us from the downward spiral, in train ever since the Garden of Eden, the inexorable, infernal circle whereby victims become victimisers, the hated become haters, and the persecuted persecutors. God became the victim of our instinct to retaliate, which from within a world of violence, injustice and hostility appears rational and even necessary for self-preservation. Being Love Itself, however, he, uniquely, did not love less: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” It was this unchanging love, unaffected by the experience of rejection or persecution, which demonstrated that goodness is more ‘original’ that sin and, thereby, wrought our salvation. To love as God loves is to love as we ourselves are loved. Every use of the word ‘love’ that leaves loving our enemies out of account, is illusory, incomplete, skewed, no matter how intensely felt or loudly professed. Only love that wills the good of all, even if the felt experience of love for those closest to us is inevitably and naturally greater, changes the world, because it changes us all, enabling us to live fully human lives, as Jesus he did. As the parable of the Good Samaritan makes disquietingly clear, there is no one who is not our neighbour.