LOVING OUR ENEMIES

Luke 6: 31-36

Today's Gospel presents us with another of those frightening injunctions of Christ namely to love our enemies. It is frightening both because of the magnitude of the task and its seeming impossibility. And yet it is not enough for us as followers of Christ to love those who love us, to do good to those who do good to us and to lend to those who lend to us. We are told categorically that even sinners do the same. So what credit is it to us if we cannot go further than that? No. "Love your enemies, and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish." Now we know already that our good acts are returned to us both practically and scripturally. And we may have met those who have so little apparently and yet give it away and by God's grace achieve unimaginable ends. I am referring to people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. "Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall be returned unto you" is a familiar verse from scripture whose truth many of us will have experienced. Only this week I had a letter and photographs from a former detainee from Ukraine, whom I had quite forgotten, together with a letter from the Greek priest in Leicester, thanking me for helping him while he was in detention. In a sense this is only like the experience above of returning god for good because I was only doing what I am paid for but even this small act was blessed by God.

But Christ is talking about something much more courageous, involving self-denial and faith, in the sense of abandonment to divine providence. It also involves danger in that we are taking the fight to evil and challenging his power by imitating God and making no distinction between friends and enemies by doing good to all. In the Gospels Christ experiences the reality of life in people when he heals the ten lepers and only one returns to thank him. He does not stop his acts of charity because of ingratitude by some. "Power came forth from him and he healed them all", we are told. But the twist in the story is not the ten- percent response but the irony of the gratitude coming from the lowest and most socially despised, the Samaritan. It seems that acts of goodness when performed through love and for no personal gain produce responses for the Kingdom in the most unexpected places. And in this act of giving unconditionally there is a glorious freedom for us in that we can see how God can use and bless the simplest act of ours.

At the end of the beatitudes which we have just sung at the Little Entrance there is another of those apparently simple but frightening sayings of Christ: "Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil falsely against you for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad for great is your reward in heaven." How does this work practically? Is it just an instruction to grin and bear it till you die rather like an indoctrinated modern terrorist who, to me at least, appears like a person who has quite lost it mentally and is programmed fanatically towards suicide. This does not look like Christ's behaviour in the purple livery of mockery and abuse before the soldiers prior to his death or like the experience of the early martyrs such as Stephen who went to his death praying for his enemies.