Christ Church

Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you

It doesn’t get much more radical and more challenging than this. A parade of seemingly impossible and impractical demands. Love your enemies? Do good to them which hate you? Bless them that curse you? Pray for them which despitefully use you? Don’t just turn your cheek away from him that smites you but offer the other cheek as well? Hit me again, Sam! To the one who takes your cloak, let him take your coat too? Give to everyone that asks you? To him that takes away your goods, do not ask to have them back? What is going on here?

As utterly impossible and, perhaps, utterly ridiculous as these demands might seem, they simply belong to a rich and powerful tradition of ethical understanding, to what is sometimes called ‘the golden rule,’ summed up here by Jesus who says “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise;” a concept of reciprocity. He elaborates upon this concept as being the very nature of love and mercy, qualities that have everything to do with the goodness of God alive in us, principles of the highest ethics of justice and the Good. They counter and correct the more commonplace tendencies of our instrumental use of one another. Indeed, “lend,” Jesus says, “hoping for nothing again”! Try telling that to the financiers of Wall Street or to the Davos elites of our world and day.

Nothing could be more radical, it seems, than this Gospel. Yet it belongs to the radical nature of our incorporation into Christ as the Epistle reading from Romans makes so abundantly clear. Baptized into Christ, we are baptized into his death so that we may be partakers of his resurrection, walking now “in newness of life.” And so we are bidden “be ye therefore merciful even as your Father also is merciful.” Here the impossible becomes not only possible but necessary.

Love your enemies. This is one of the great Christian contributions to the moral discourse about the virtues of the soul, especially justice. Is it right to give back to your neighbour who is gone mad the axe which you borrowed from him? It is his but he is mad and therefore a danger to himself and others; in short, an enemy of all, an enemy of the human community. This is Plato’s argument against the commonplace but mistaken or at least incomplete idea that justice is about giving to each what is their due. The deeper question is precisely about what do we owe to one another? Or is justice simply doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies? Again, Plato in the Republic makes the strong point that justice cannot be about harming anyone or anything. “Love your enemies, and do good,” Jesus says. Somehow we have to think the Good in order to do what is right.

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The collect for today, the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O God, who hast preparest for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding: Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 6:3-11
The Gospel: St Luke 6:27-36

Artwork: James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer (Le “Pater Noster”), 1886-96. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.

The collect for today, the commemoration of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England, Scholar, Reformation Martyr (source):

Almighty God,
who strengthened Thomas More
to be in office a king’s good servant
but in conscience your servant first,
grant us in all our doubts and uncertainties
to feel the grasp of your holy hand
and to live by faith in your promise
that you shall not let us be lost;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:13-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:13-17

A meditation of Thomas More, written in the Tower of London a year before he was beheaded:

Give me your grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought,
to set my mind fast upon you and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths.
To be content to be solitary.
Not to long for worldly company,
little and little utterly to cast off the world, and rid my mind of the business thereof.
Not to long to hear of any worldly things,
but that the hearing of worldly fantasies may be to me displeasant.
Gladly to be thinking God,
busily to labour to love him.
To know own vility and wretchedness,
to humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God,
to bewail my sins passed;
for the purging of them, patiently to suffer adversity.
Gladly to bear my purgatory here,
to be joyful of tribulations,
to walk the narrow way that leads to life.
To bear the cross with Christ,
to have the last thing—death—in remembrance,
to have ever before my eye death, that is ever at hand;
to make death no stranger to me;
to foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell;
to pray for pardon before the Judge comes.
To have continually in mind the passion that Christ suffered for me;
For his benefits incessantly to give him thanks,
to buy the time again that I before have lost.
To abstain from vain confabulations,
To eschew light foolish mirth and gladness;
To cut off unnecessary recreations.
Of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all–
To set the loss at nought for the winning of Christ.
To think my worst enemies my best friends,
for the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good
with their love and favour as they did with their hatred and malice.

Artwork: Peter Paul Rubens (after the portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger), Thomas More, 1630. Prado, Madrid.

Click here to download the Calendar of Services and Events for the period Fall 2018 through Spring 2019 (pdf document).

The collect for today, the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth (source):

Almighty God,
by whose grace Elizabeth rejoiced with Mary
and greeted her as the mother of the Lord:
look with favour, we beseech thee, on thy lowly servants,
that, with Mary, we may magnify thy holy name
and rejoice to acclaim her Son our Saviour,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 2:1-10
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:39-56

Artwork: Robert Anning Bell, The Meeting Of The Virgin And Saint Elizabeth, 1910. Tempera on linen, Manchester Art Gallery.

“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless,
at thy word I will let down the net.”

Knowledge is power, it is commonly said. It serves as the defining cliche or mantra for our modern technocratic world, a world dominated by our assumptions of power over nature through technology and, paradoxically, over ourselves. But it is a dangerous and destructive mantra and one which is largely false. What kind of knowledge and what kind of power? To ask the questions is to begin to be more critical about human reason and to realise our limitations.

The phrase “knowledge is power” is usually attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, the father of empirical philosophy in the early sixteenth century. Certainly the question for him was about how our knowledge could be used to better the human condition but he was under no illusion about how false and falsifying our claims to knowledge, either through the physical senses or through the mental operations of our minds, could be. His was a cautious interrogation of nature, forcing her to give up her secrets through careful experimentation. Marx would later take up the scientific idea to say that the point is not to know nature but to use nature for our ends. With industrialization and now digital automation, we confront the dark side of these assumptions and their realizations.

We are no longer at ease in a world of human domination of either nature or ourselves. The narratives of progress are equally fraught with the conditions of loss and destruction: the seas have been overfished; the land diminished and destroyed by pesticides and machines belonging to the industrialization of agriculture. We have lost our connection to land and sea; in short, to creation.

We also have got the narratives all wrong. For Bacon, the world was God’s creation and he did not say that knowledge is power but that God’s knowledge is power. Therein lies an important distinction and one which belongs to the insights of our religious and philosophical traditions. They provide a counter to our hubris and destructive domination of nature and ourselves.

Nautical, sea-faring and fishing images complement the more abundant agrarian, agricultural and farming images in the Gospels. They belong not to our domination and manipulation of nature and our humanity, not to the dynamics of power, but to the truth of our incorporation into the life of God in Jesus Christ. They recall us at once to our necessary and inescapable connection to the created world and to the God in whose image we are made. As such they provide a self-critique of human reason without which there is only loss and destruction, a loss and a destruction that is entirely our doing.

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The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:8-15a
The Gospel: St. Luke 5:1-11

Artwork: Sebastiano Ricci, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c. 1695-97. Oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts.

The collect for today, Dominion Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in love: Vouchsafe so to bless thy servant our Queen, and her Government in this Dominion of Canada, that thy people may dwell in peace and safety, and thy Church serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 2:11-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22:16-22