Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel reading ends with a tall order: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It’s difficult enough to think about being perfect, let alone being perfect like God! This tall order comes at the end of one of the most difficult passages in all of Scripture. In it, Jesus tells his disciples to love their enemies. Where many quotes from Scripture may have lost their punch over the centuries, this one remains rather startling. What Jesus is commanding here just doesn’t seem rational; how are we supposed to love the very people who we call our enemies?
The first memory I have of this reading is from when I was about ten years old. I remember being at mass with my family, sitting in the choir loft and listening to the priest’s deep voice as he read. I was baffled by Jesus’ words, mostly because I really wasn’t sure what he meant by “enemies.” I tried my hardest to come up with someone who was my enemy, then I could get down to the business of loving them. I assumed that the loving was the easy part, if only I could figure out who it was. The person I came up with was a boy who had teased me all through elementary school. If I had an enemy, I thought, it was that kid.
As we get older, the question Who is my enemy? becomes more and more difficult. The more we live, the more people we encounter who might fall into the ‘enemy’ category. We find all kinds of people with whom we’re at odds—personally, professionally, as a family, or as a nation. The loving part also becomes more difficult as it’s hard to know what it means to love someone with whom we do not speak or whom we do not really know.
When Jesus says to be “perfect,” he could mean it in the sense of “complete.” Maybe what it means to be fully human requires that we treat all people—even our enemies—with selfless love. We may not fully understand what it means but the more we open ourselves to the grace of God, the more open we will be to the moments where we can exercise that love.
- Katherine Schmidt