“Love your enemies”
The Collect which graces this day and the week following is one of the most beautiful and compelling in the Prayer Book. It captures profoundly the nature of our human longings and the reality of the human condition.
“O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding,” it begins, defining us in terms of God’s love; both our love for God and the love that is God himself. But what do we mean by love? Something of the radical nature of the love of God for us and in us is hinted at in the Collect. Not only does it belong to those “good things [that] pass man’s understanding,” but more significantly to “promises which exceed all that we can desire.” We are directed to something beyond our knowing and beyond our desiring and yet a something more that belongs to what God wants for us.
But is this something more merely something whimsical? A fantasy? An illusion? “Pie in the sky, by and by”? Unreal, unknowable and unattainable? If it is beyond our knowing and our wanting, then how can it have any meaning for us? Because it is something that has been prepared for us, something that has been made known to us. We can enter into it and struggle to know and love the things of God more dearly, more clearly and more freely. In other words “the good things [that] pass man’s understanding” are not of our own devising. They are not simply the products or the projections of ourselves. The promises of God always exceed our desiring precisely because we do not always know clearly what we want. This is part and parcel of our human condition. We confront the limits of our knowing and our desiring. We confront the incompleteness of our knowing and our willing.
In the ancient view of things, this is both the beginning and the end of wisdom. The wisdom of the Delphic Oracle to “know thyself” is the ancient maxim of the Greeks and it means to accept your place in the cosmos. To do so means “to know that you do not know,” as Socrates puts it. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” is the Jewish form of the same teaching. Both would remind us of our essential finitude and of the great, unbridgeable gulf between God and ourselves. To accept this without looking for anything more is the ancient wisdom. “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man,” as Ecclesiastes puts it. “There is,” after all, “nothing new under the sun.” The phenomenal world, the world that presents itself to our senses, is all much of a sameness. “I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”
There is something quite wonderful and free in such a perspective. To accept the world as a rational and ordered whole and not to demand of it any more than what it offers, to insist on the reasonableness of the world as against the view that everything is arbitrary, indifferent and irrational; this is astounding. But it cannot hide the dangers of a kind of fatalism, frustration and futility.
There is something about our humanity which speaks to us about something more. Even Ecclesiastes acknowledges this, for “God has put eternity into the mind of man,” though to be aware of the eternal does not mean that there is any hope of eternity for man himself. Aristotle, too, argues that friendship between God and man is a thing impossible – there is a kind of incommensurability between the human and the divine, a gulf that cannot be bridged. For the ancient Greeks, we remain endlessly separated from the free and perfect realm of the gods whose life we can only approximate in the freedom of the games, in the political community, and, above all, in contemplative life. And for the ancient Jews, the highest end is about walking with God through obedience to his laws – once again, living one’s life in accord with the reason of God in the world but with no expectation of anything more than what the law provides. “My delight is in the law of the Lord,” as the Psalmist says. This is high wisdom.
And it belongs to that high wisdom to have a corresponding high ethic of behaviour. For both Jew and Greek, there is a moral obligation towards the stranger, the sojourner. The laws of hospitality are sacrosanct – this is a wisdom that carries on into the modern world. But why should you love the sojourner – the stranger? Because “you, too, were once a sojourner in the land of Egypt,” God reminds Israel in Exodus. Because the stranger and the wayfarer are under the protection of the gods, says Homer and the poets.
But to “love your enemies”? This is the distinctive Christian wisdom. And how is it possible? Because, as Jesus says, “I have called you friends.” What we cannot imagine or think, what we could not even desire or look for, has happened and has been made know to us. The Epistle lesson for today shows us the nature of the friendship between God and man through our “being baptized into the death of Christ” so that through his resurrection “we also should walk in newness of life,” “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord”.
This gives a completely new foundation and a new orientation to our lives. It is something which has been revealed to us. It is something which speaks to the deepest desires of our hearts and more. The Epistle establishes that new principle of identity – an identity with God through Christ, a friendship between God and man which does not obliterate the distinction between heaven and earth, God and man, but which gives us the hope of heaven. The fulfillment and perfection of our humanity is to be found with God.
We are, however, always in the process of becoming what we are in Christ. And this requires a new ethic with even higher, indeed, impossible demands. Once again, the Gospel is the illustration of the new and Christian ethical demand which follows from this principle of identity and friendship in Christ.
In St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain parallels the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, conveying many of the same teachings. The fact that the lesson here is from the Sermon on the Plain is, however, instructive. We cannot, after all, climb up to God by virtue of some power in ourselves; no, the friendship between God and man is accomplished by God’s grace towards us in the mercy of Christ. God’s grace has come down to us. It is precisely this that is beyond human knowing and desiring – we could not invent this, anymore than from the perspective of the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, one could invent the transcendent God of all reality. We can know God because he makes himself known to us. But even more, our reason is transformed and lifted up to contemplate and participate in the divine life itself.
The Gospel illustrates the new ethical demand that follows from this new ontology, this new sense of identity presented in the Epistle. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says, commanding what is simply and utterly impossible. Why, we have the hardest time loving those whom we profess to love and care for, let alone those whose will is dead set against us! And yet, this new ethical demand, impossible as it may seem, is made not only possible but necessary because of that other impossible thing, the friendship between God and man realized in Jesus Christ. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were the enemies of God, God loved us. We are bidden to act out of that love, a love which goes beyond “the devices and the desires of our own hearts.” In other words, there is something more than just what is “under the sun” for us. It changes how we are to think and act towards one another in the world.
There is something more beyond the seemingly endless animosities and divisions within our hearts and between one another. Our identity in Christ compels us to transcend the animosities which belong to our sinfulness, our brokenness, our wounded and fallen nature. Impossible, is it not? By ourselves, yes. It is beyond what we can imagine, let alone do. But God in his mercy does not leave us in our distress and anxiety. “For them that love [him]” – an impossibility made possible in Jesus Christ – he has prepared “such good things as pass man’s understanding“ and that “exceed all that we can desire”.
And here, in the liturgy, we are invited to take hold of those “good things” that we may become what we are in Christ Jesus, “alive unto God,” learning to love even our enemies through the one who loves us while we yet his enemies.
“Love your enemies”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2010
Christ Church, 8:00am