Today’s Gospel reading is taken from Saint Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, and in it we hear Jesus Christ’s challenging words about loving our enemies.
We are used to the idea that we should not do to others what we would not wish them to do to us. However, Jesus Christ goes beyond this precept, turning a negative into a positive, and saying that we should treat others as we would wish to be treated by them.
And, as if that were not enough, Christ goes even further, insisting that our love for others should be disinterested. We are not to love them in the hope that they should love us back; instead, we are to “expect nothing in return.” Most radically, perhaps, we are even called to love our enemies, those who most definitely do not seem to love us.
In such teachings we encounter the truly radical nature of the Gospel. If we are honest with ourselves, we should probably admit that this seems impossible – to love those who hurt us and continue to hurt us! But Christ gives us a clue in the final words of today’s Gospel: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” This is not some abstract command or some external standard that we cannot live up to. By ourselves we cannot love. But we learn to love by becoming attentive to the love of God. For God is the “Lover of humankind” as we frequently repeat in the Liturgy, and it is only by coming to see His love in our lives that we can gradually come to share in His love, learning to see other people as He sees them, and acquiring perhaps even just a few drops from His measureless ocean of mercy.