Love Your Enemies
How can we love more like God? Br. Antony Augustine Cherian, O.P., shares a Gospel reflection for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Lk 6:27–38) in our weekly video series.
The First letter of St. John says, “in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son as a sacrifice for our sins.” The love of God turns our world upside down and inside out! I mean this in three ways. First of all, the love of God is God’s love for us. God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—possesses, or rather is, absolute perfection. Even before creating any human, angel, or the first speck of our material universe, God was perfectly happy. The communion of the Trinity is the most perfect happiness, and leaves God in need of nothing else.
So, God didn’t create us for any benefit to Him, but out of sheer generosity. And, beyond creating us, God gave us the freedom to either love Him or to fall away from Him. Then, after we fell away, He became one of us and died a horrible death to reconcile us to Himself. That is the love God has for us.
Second, the love of God, that is, our love of God, changes every aspect of how we live. If God loves us despite our faults and failings, how much should we love Him? Our relationship with Him should be the most important thing in our lives, the only important thing in our lives. After all, the relationship which God offers us doesn’t last for five years, ten years, or a hundred years, but for all eternity. When we love God, we get a chance to enter into that perfect happiness of the Trinity.
And third, the love of God changes us because, if we let Him, God loves in us and through us. We stop loving with our own love, and start loving with the love of God. We learn to love God like the persons of the Trinity love each other. We learn to love our family, our friends, our neighbors, and even our enemies with the love of God, the love with which God loves all of us.
When we love with this love, we love with the gratuitous, selfless abundance with which God loves us. We learn to be generous even to those who hurt us, just as God is generous with us who turn away from Him. We learn to give, to serve, to forgive. And, at the end of the day, when we love with this love, it will be this love which we will receive back, “good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing.”
Image: Cosimo Rosselli, The Sermon on the Mount, 1481-2, Public Domain
