“Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you”
How utterly impossible, perhaps, utterly unimaginable. Yet the Collect notes, “God has prepared for them that love [him] such good things as pass man’s understanding.” And so we pray God to “pour into our hearts such love toward [him], that we, loving [him] above all things, may obtain [his] promises which exceed” or go beyond, “all that we can desire.” Remarkably concise and comprehensive, it gathers together into a kind of fulness what is presented in the Epistle and Gospel. It is the crystallization of an essential theological and ethical understanding that belongs at once to the core of Christian thought and to what moves in the thinking of the great religions and philosophies of the world. In the most radical sense, we confront the deep meaning of love, not as sentiment and emotion, but as the divine love which seeks the perfection of our loves, without which, as Paul puts it in 1st Cor. 13, “we are nothing,” and, indeed, dead to God and to one another. “No story so divine.”
No passage of Scripture is more compelling and telling about God as love than today’s Gospel. It illustrates what the Epistle says about the radical meaning of baptism theologically and ethically in terms of “being dead to sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Only so may we begin to make sense of the Gospel reading.
Nothing could be more counter-culture in the face of a world of hatreds and animosities, of divisions and enmities. But, in truth, it challenges and counters each of us about the divisions and divides within our own hearts. Our “enemies” are not just out there in the world, which to be sure “hates” us, as John says in the 2nd lesson at Evening Prayer for today. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you”(Jn. 15.18,19).
But doesn’t this just leave us with the same division between hate and love that Luke here seems to counter? “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you,” Jesus says. That is utterly impossible simply on our part because we have become, as Augustine says, “a question or problem to ourselves”(Conf. X. xxxiii). We know in some sense or other that we are divided in ourselves about ourselves. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do”(Rom. 7.19), as Paul says about himself and all of us. This is the idea of original sin and its legacy or effects in our lives. Yet this is actually good news because it presupposes the absolute goodness of God without which we couldn’t know ourselves as sinners, on the one hand, and as reborn and renewed in Christ, on the other hand. In the Christian understanding, it all turns on our being “buried with him by baptism into death,” his death for us, “that like as Christ was raised from the dead, … we also should walk in newness of life.”
Both Epistle and Gospel recall us to the radical meaning of divine love made known in the Passion of Christ. That is love in the face of hatred and enmity, the love which says on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” John, quoting the Psalms, says, “They hated me without a cause.” To love your enemies transcends the divisions within us and without us in our world and day. That means to take a hold of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity as reconstituted and renewed by God. His love recalls us to the truth of ourselves as made in his image. Today’s Gospel ends with the opening words of the Gospel two weeks ago: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”; in short, to act out of the love and mercy that has been shown to us. In a way, this radical love concentrates for us the entire essence of the Christian Faith. It challenges us to love in the face of all forms of hatred and violence, destruction and rage, both within ourselves and our world. It doesn’t mean you have to like them, ‘likes’ are one of the diseases of the digital world. But it means to see one another as made in the image of God regardless of our feelings.
This way of thinking and acting reminds us that we are more than the animosities and hatreds within and without us, that we are more than what we do or even what we think we want to be, as if we are simply “the things we choose to embrace because we like them”(Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, June 29th 2026); pure solipsism. While our text concentrates the essence of the Christian faith, it also crystallizes an ethical imperative that is in some sense universal.
“I was not born to hate but to love,” Antigone famously says, in Sophocles’ play by that name, in the face of Creon’s dictate that her brother who had fought against him and Thebes not be granted burial; a desecration of the dead. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates challenges the conventional view of justice, both ancient and modern, that justice means “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” Justice, he says, cannot mean doing harm, period. Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, too, faces an ethical dilemma. Standing between two great armies consisting of family on both sides, he asks why he should fight. Sri Krishna, an avatar or emanation of Vishnu, one of the three primary deities in Hinduism, teaches him about his dharma, the law or duty of his being. He is a warrior prince. Sri Krishna teaches him about the yogas: the path of action, karma joga, the path of knowledge, jnana yoga, and the path of devotion, bhakti yoga. To follow his dharma means to act without attachment to the results.
In 1943, in the dark days of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis gave three lectures in Durham, England, published asThe Abolition of Man. His most philosophical work, he described it as “almost my favourite among my books.” It is a treatise about the primacy of the ethical, what he calls the Tao, or the Way, using a term from the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius. Lewis highlights the cross-cultural features of ethical wisdom wherein “we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human,” and not as an abstraction. He uncovers what belongs to the so-called axial age, a term used to describe the turn towards the ethical across a number of cultures independent of one another roughly between 800BC and 300BC – Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Greek, for example, and which contribute to the post-axial religions and philosophies of Buddhism, Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and neo-Platonism.
It is a trenchant critique of modernity in the claim to “humanity’s conquest of nature which turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be nature’s conquest of humanity.” Why so? Because how we think about nature is bound up with how we think about ourselves in the interplay and now the confusion between the natural ‘sciences’ and the human ‘sciences’. Nature “seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or … no causality at all) as against final causes;” in short, a world of manipulation and control but not of understanding and respect.
Timothy Finley’s Canadian classic The Wars shows that the technology of war destroys both nature and ourselves because of a profound ethical deficit. It is captured in an incomplete syllogism about the things we make to destroy one another: “they wouldn’t; they couldn’t; they did.” A lovely digest of original sin, we might say.
The Tao, as Lewis sees it, recalls us to an older wisdom which we have forgotten or lost. “For the wise ones of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique;” the techniques of destructive manipulation and destruction. As Lewis concludes in The Abolition of Man, this is the illusion of progress in “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination – the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds.” Too much left-brain thinking, as Iain McGilchrist suggests.
Our readings and liturgy today help us to reclaim another way of thinking and acting that belongs to the wonder and dignity of our humanity. A way of placing ourselves and one another, whether friends or enemies, with God.
It is best expressed in Samuel Crossman’s poem, Hymn # 596, written while he was a Puritan in exile after the Restoration in England before becoming an Anglican priest. “My Song is Love unknown,/ My Saviour’s love to me,/ Love to the loveless shown,/ That they might lovely be./ O who am I,/ That for my sake/ My Lord should take/ Frail flesh, and die?” It is a lovely abridgement of George Herbert’s poem, The Sacrifice, where sixty-one of its sixty-three verses are punctuated with the refrain from Lamentations, “Was ever grief like mine?” It is a most moving meditation on the Passion of Christ, whose love bears all our hatreds and animosities against God himself. As Crossman puts it, “Yet cheerful he/ To suffering goes,/ That he his foes/ From thence might free.” Twice Herbert changes the concluding refrain to the declarative affirmative that “Never was grief like mine,” first, in reference to Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross, “My God, My God,” and, secondly, in the conclusion. Crossman likewise ends his poem/hymn “Never was love, dear King,/ Never was grief like thine./This is my Friend,/ In whose sweet praise/I all my days/ Could gladly spend.” There is, he says, “No story so divine.”
“ Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2026