Saturday in the First Week of Lent, February 24, 2024

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.”

“You have heard that it was said, etc.”  The Lord Jesus is fulfilling, completing, the Law as he said he had come to do: “Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5, 17).  In doing so he so he offers a renewed Judaism that can lead not to mere worldly prosperity, as the Old Law had promised, but to immortality with God.  Over the course of a decade or two it became clear that the Jews by and large did not accept the fulfilled Law Jesus provided and so a separate religion took its place.  St. Paul would teach that those who believed in Christ were in fact the true Jews irrespective of tracing one’s genetic heritage back to Abraham: “For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal” (Romans 2, 28-29).

The central fulfillment of the moral Law which the Lord Jesus fulfills in that of the love of God and man.  The Old Law was based upon duty, plain and simple.  The fulfilled Law sees our duty not in prescribed outward actions but in loving God with all our heart, mind and soul as our Father in heaven who loves us with an love beyond all telling, and in our love of neighbors for the sake of the God who loves them just as much.

“You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  This commandment is not found in the Hebrew Bible but may have been taught by the Pharisees.  The Lord completes this commandment with, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Heavenly Father.”  We love our enemies best by praying for their conversion even as we may prayer for justice if they have harmed us.  “Those who persecute you”.  We tend to associate the word “persecute” with religious persecution, but the Greek word can mean anyone who harasses and threatens another.  To follow this new commandment is to live in a distinctly new way and to go counter to what our fallen human nature urges.  We do this for the sake of our Heavenly Father who “causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust”, benefitting the crops of all.  As of today say: Love your enemies because God does.  He does not let someone’s wicked actions stop him from loving them.  The Lord Jesus emphasizes that his followers must be distinct from those who follow the Old Law, and from those who follow no law: “if you greet your brothers and sisters only, what is unusual about that?”  The Christian is to be “unusual”.  It is the Christian who is the be “the light of the world”.  All others simply justify the behavior they pursue by encoding it and teaching it, or building a philosophy or pseudo-science around it.  

“So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  The Greek word translated here as “perfect” also means “full-grown”.  Jesus does not command us to have the Father’s perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence) to be as perfect as a human can be, and by this Jesus means love.  Through God’s grace we can love God and neighbor to the extent possible for us.  And we do this for God’s sake.  Through doing this we are conformed more and more to God’s Son and are prepared for the eternal recompense the Son died to give us.