The Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, February 20, 2022

I’m sorry to have missed a few days.  These have been very hard days, but I feel very much better now.  Thank you for your prayers!

Luke 6:27–38

Jesus said to his disciples: “To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. Give to everyone who asks of you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, and get back the same amount. But rather, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”

The Lord Jesus does not merely tell us to love one another, leaving us to guess at what that means: he explains love to us so that we can carry it out.  And although it may strike us as unloving that we are to “carry out” our love, we must remember that love has to be expressed in actions, just as faith and hope do.  What St. James says about faith applies equally to love: “But will you know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?” (James 2, 20).  The Lord commands us to love one another, including those who hate us.  That is because in order for us to become perfect we must love as he does: “Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and slander you, that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and rains upon the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5, 44-45).  We love for the sake of the One who loves us.  This requires untwisting our twisted human nature — difficult work which we can do only with the help of God’s grace.  That this is possible at all is shone us not only in the life of Christ but also in the lives of his saints.  We can do this, and we must do this.  Loving as Christ loves is for our good and ultimately God’s glory.  It is for our good because it results in an eternal reward of unimaginable ecstasy.  Only those who love perfectly can bear this ecstasy and be transformed by it.  All others will back away from it as yet without the capacity for it.

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”  Here, the Lord lays out the general principles of our love for others.  “To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic.”  Next, he uses hyperbole to emphasize the imperative of this love.  He sums up his teaching with, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  That is, consider in what way you can serve a given person, according to your abilities and within your already existing responsibilities, and then act accordingly.  The most important action we can perform is to pray, although it is often the last action we think of.  We should, in fact, pray in our considerations and for the other’s good.  “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.”  That is, Even the secular-minded people around us love those who love them.  “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.”  This is a much misunderstood commandment.  The Greek word translated here as “judging” means “to bring to trial” or “to decide innocence and guilt”, in a judicial context.  It is to be compared with “condemning”.  We are not to set ourselves up as God as though to judge another soul, for God alone is the Judge: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12, 19).  Vengeance, or, punishment, is God’s, not ours, to hand out. 

“Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap.”  This is the ecstasy of heaven.  It will pour over and through us in an everlasting torrent.  Some will experience it more keenly than others, for “the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”  If we love without measure, we will experience love without measure to our fullest ability to receive it.

This love that our Lord so wants us to enjoy that he commands us to show it so that we can receive it, is not the mere natural love all people are capable of, but the supernatural love that only the children of God can love with.  We pray that we may love fully with this love, itself a gift of God.