by CCW | 16 July 2023 10:00
This morning’s Gospel ends where we began two weeks ago. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” The radical meaning of that mercy is expressed in our text: “love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.” Nothing could be more counter-culture. Nothing better expresses the ultimate ethical statement that belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity. And yet, this commandment, the impossible somehow made possible, is but the illustration of the Epistle reading from Romans about the nature of our reconciliation and life in Christ.
“Know ye not,” St. Paul asks us, with a rhetorical flourish, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” Death and resurrection lead to “newness of life”, having crucified “our old Adam,” having destroyed “our sinful self,” “that we should never again be slaves to sin.” Powerful ideas that belong exactly to the radical meaning of our life in Christ, “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What does that mean? Simply that Christ lives in us.
We are only alive when we live in the reconciling love of Christ. This transcends the oppositions of our souls and lives, our enmities and hatreds. For that is the real meaning of sin: our opposition and hostility to the deeper truth of our humanity as found in God. No one expresses this better than the great second-century theologian, Irenaeus: “The glory of God is humanity alive and the life of man is the vision of God.” God in man and man in God. To have a glimpse of this changes how we see everything. It signals the overcoming of all division and opposition, all animosity and enmity. This is truly radical because it is God’s truth and life in us. And it is equally the counter to the so-called ‘transhumanisms’ of our contemporary world which are really anti-human and anti-life, turning ourselves into machines and/or negating our embodiment as living beings.
This word challenges our world of endless divisions and strife both ancient and modern. Socrates in Plato’s Republic counters both the conventional views of justice and the ‘sophistic’ rejection of justice which is really anti-human as well. The conventional view, then and now, is that justice means “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” As Socrates points out with great clarity, justice as a virtue, a quality of excellence, cannot result in doing harm to anyone or anything. He also attempts to counter Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is “the interest of the stronger;” in short, that might equals right. That really means there is no justice, no truth, just power and domination which is predicated upon division and enmity; it is ultimately anti-human. Here we are opened out to a greater vision and a greater truth not simply about our being in the world but about our being in Christ, our life in the vision of God, to put it in Irenaeus’s terms.
This is not some idealistic or utopian fantasy. Jesus is not saying that you have no enemies. He bids us love our enemies which suggests they still are our enemies yet love transcends that divide, that opposition. How? By reminding us of who we are in God. We are bidden to love what God loves in all of us: the image of himself in his truth and beauty. Something of the glory of God is made visible in our humanity despite our faults and failings. For such things belong to our untruth, the great untruth of our separation from God and from one another, and even from ourselves. Paradoxically, to love our enemies includes loving ourselves not in our self-obsessions and narcissisms but who we are in Christ. This is Paul’s great teaching in the Epistle and illustrated in the Gospel. The truest form of justice is found in the divine love which is the ultimate good of all creation as grounded in God himself.
Love your enemies is more than mere words because the commandment to love is the radical meaning of the Cross and as such it reveals the radical meaning of the Incarnation. Herein is love in its deepest truth, the reconciliation and overcoming of all opposition. We aren’t defined by our divisions and animosities, by our faults and failings, our sins and follies. The motion of God’s reconciling love towards us is made visible on the Cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Can anything be more touching, more piercing to our souls? As Paul so clearly knows, “the good that I would do, I do not do; the evil that I would not do, that I do.” Divided in ourselves we are our own enemies. We confront ourselves in our enmity with ourselves and with God’s truth and goodness. Yet that truth and goodness is greater by definition than sin and evil, greater than division and enmity. And Paul wants us to know this: “know ye not?”, he asks us about our baptism and life in Christ. We are meant to live in the reconciling love of God in Christ. Only so are we alive.
We are called to something more than the unhappy divisions of our souls and our world. God “has prepared for them that love him such good things as pass man’s understanding,” as the Collect so beautifully puts it. We are meant to glimpse and indeed grasp what is not a social construct, not a human invention, not something of our doing on our own, but divine. To be called to the love of God means to love our enemies, including ourselves in our divided affections. We are commanded to do what seems impossible: loving God “above all things” is the principle of our loving ourselves and one another, even our enemies. God’s promises are God’s truth “which exceed[s]” by definition, “all that we can desire.” And what we desire is far more and far greater than what we think we deserve. This, too, is counter-culture. It places our current preoccupations with human rights upon another foundation.
What we desire can only be what God desires. For that is the radical meaning of the love of God. And nowhere is that ethical imperative more clearly articulated and more wonderfully illustrated than in Christ’s commandment to love our enemies.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2023
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