7th Sunday Ordinary (C): "Love your enemies"

by Rev. Jovy B Roldan  |  02/23/2025  |  From the Clergy

Today’s Gospel urges Christians to remain true to their nature to love even when the people around them remain adamant in their nature to hate.

In the First Reading, Saul loved David like a Son, but Saul began to be jealous of David’s popularity. Saul began to pursue David to kill him in order to remove this threat. It would be expected, given the opportunity that David would in turn take Saul’s life in order to “get even.” But when Saul and his men fall asleep and David had a good chance of hitting Saul, he did not “take advantage” of him. David respected Saul as anointed by God.

St. Luke often uses a technique scripture scholars call the “Great Reversal.” St. Luke Luke will lay out certain things people had been taught to believe about God or expect from life, then, out of the blue, reveal Jesus as completely reversing their notions. The prevailing notion was that the score should always “be even.” Revenge was not totally acceptable, but “getting even” was not only acceptable, it was even required for the sake of honor. But for Jesus giving is far more important than having. We should be generous without number. Our kindness should go beyond human level; it should take a little higher than the ordinary. It should go as far as wishing all the best for our enemies. The Christian ethic is positive. It does not consist in “not doing” but in doing them. Jesus gave us the Golden rule which bids us do to others as we should have them do to us. In history, many old writers and teachers (Hillel, Philo, Confucius etc.,) did it in a negative form, “Do not do onto others, what you do not want others to do unto you.” For Christ, a good moral conduct is always in the active “act of doing” and not simply avoiding the responsibility, in the passive approach of “not doing.” It took godly men like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to re-awaken Christians to the importance of non- violence as the norm of the Christian response to persecution, oppression, abuse and injustice. Jesus remains the greatest teacher and example of non-violence, for even as they were leading him out to a shameful, public execution on the cross, he was still able to say, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). By nature we love only friends and dear ones. We do not care so much for our enemies. Loving enemies is not only something we do not do, but something that we can hardly do. Something beyond our human power. Loving those who hate us needs a “backup” from the Divine. We need grace. Only the Spirit of God can give us wisdom to understand why we should love our enemies. We need the grace to see on the cross, the meaning of “dying for” sinful humanity, as an act of God’s unconditional love for us. It is not to our neighbor that we must compare ourselves, it is to God. The reason for Christ’s advice to love our enemies is that it makes us like God. It is the way he acts. God sends his rain to the just and the unjust; he embraces both sinners and saints. It is that love that we must copy. If we seek our enemy’s highest good, we will in truth be part of the children of God. We see that “enemies” here means those who hate the disciples, not those whom the disciples hate. Disciples are to hate no one. If by enemies we mean those we hate, then Christians should have no enemies. But if by enemies we mean those who hate us, then we cannot help having enemies. We cannot control how others treat us; we can only control how we treat them. We cannot force anyone to like us, but we can always convince ourselves – to love, even though we are not loved. The Gospel reminds us today that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. If there is in our lives a scorpion of hate that delights in stinging us, let us remain faithful to our commitment to love.

-Rev. Jovy B Roldan