Saturday in the First Week of Lent, March 4, 2023

Matthew 5, 43-48

Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers and sisters only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To close out the first week of Lent, the Holy Church presents as the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass this passage from the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount.  In it, the Lord Jesus teaches about the love with which we ought to love even our enemies.  As we carefully read this passage we should recollect how our Lord loved his enemies and prayed for those who persecuted him.

“You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  The Lord seems to be quoting an oral admonition by the Pharisees, for it is not in the Scriptures.  In that case, he is challenging them and their pretended authority on “the seat of Moses” as well as taking on a natural human response: that of hating one’s enemies.  The Lord also sums up the attitude in an intriguing way, equating one’s neighbors with those to be loved, thus making one’s enemies outsiders, non-neighbors.  These would seem to be, especially from a Pharisaic point of view, “tax collectors and sinners”, as well as Herod and his supporters.  In this way, the Pharisees could control who was to be loved and who was to be hated: those whom the Pharisees counted as enemies.  However, the Lord says to the crowd: “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you”, meaning that an enemy could potentially live nearby and be anyone at all.  And if we love our enemies, we love them as we love our friends.  How can we do what seems so unnatural?  We do it as we see our Father doing it: “For he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”  

But how do we do this?  The Lord says, “Pray for those who persecute you.”  By praying for both our enemies and on those who love us, we also “cause rain to fall” on both as the Father does.  And praying for a person — for their health and total conversion to Christ — is the greatest act we can perform for a person.  We may do some other things for people who love us that we might not do for those who do not, but this comes out of prudence.  Prayer, though, comes as the one great action that love compels from us.  This does not necessarily make it easy to do, either, but we look at how our Lord forgave even those who were crucifying him and we do it, for his sake.  

“For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?”  Here, the Lord appeals to the people’s desire for salvation.  He is saying, If you cannot love your enemies by praying for your persecutors because it is right to do so, and if you struggle to pray for them for my sake, then at least pray for them so that you may attain everlasting life.  The Lord also shows that a distinctive mark of the Christian is in praying for those who hate and persecute us.

“So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  If we were to take this verse out of context and study it, we would despair because the Father is infinite and omnipotent.  He is perfect in every possible way.  There are no limits to his presence, his power, or his knowledge.  No human can be perfect like this.  But the verse has to be read in context.  The perfection the Lord Jesus speaks of is in terms of love, and in this we can be perfect.  That is, we can love to the extent that we have the ability to love, just as the Father loves without limits.  We humans love as much as we can and God loves as much as he can.  The “amount” of love differs greatly between what God can do and what we can, but that is because we are mortals and are necessarily proscribed by limitations.  And at the same time we can love perfectly.  By his grace, we can love our neighbors (as defined by Christ and not by the Pharisees) as ourselves and we can love God with all our mind and soul.  

We should not overlook the fact that the Lord specifically speaks of those who persecute us.  At the time he said this, he was still largely unhindered by the Pharisees and Sanhedrin.  He had certainly faced some criticism and opposition from them, but not what we would call “persecution”.  This might indicate that he is speaking here primarily to his Apostles, whom he had already warned about coming persecutions; or that the Lord originally spoke these words nearer to the time of his Passion and Death, or even after his Resurrection, and that St. Matthew transposed them to the beginning of his Gospel.  At the same time, we should recognize that, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, most of the events in the first three Gospels take place in the last year or even the last few months of the Lord’s life on earth, and so the Sermon on the Mount, in which we find them, took place towards the end of his ministry, not at its beginning, as it may appear to us.

Only with grace we can become perfect, so let us pray for this grace and pray for those who hate and persecute us and our Church.