Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
The text from Matthew for today acknowledges something that human beings do all the time. We make sense of ourselves and others by creating pairs of opposing terms (or binary oppositions), with one part of the pair good and the other part bad. In today’s text, the binaries include “neighbors” and “enemies,” “the evil” and “the good,” “the righteous and the unrighteous.” Then we assign categories of people to these binaries. One ethnicity is “neighbor,” while another is the “enemy.” One religion is “righteous,” while another is “unrighteous.” One political affiliation is “good,” while another is “evil.” In this way, we create order. We know who our friends and foes are.
In this text from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus messes with this by telling us something about God. He says that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” God doesn’t make the sun rise only on the good, leaving the evil in the dark. God doesn’t send rain only on the righteous, leaving the unrighteous parched. All receive these gifts and abundantly.
Jesus also tells us something about ourselves. We are children of God. We are children of this God who blesses everyone no matter where they fall in these binaries. Being children of this God, Jesus commands us to “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
What might that mean, practically speaking? Speaking for myself, I think it means at least three things:
First, I should think about my enemies. Who are my enemies? What about them makes them my enemy? Do I even know them? Maybe they are my enemy or maybe they aren’t. Over time, enemies change. People who spoke German were once the “enemy.” People who looked Japanese were once the “enemy.” Were they really the enemy? God was showering sun and rain on them all the while they were the “enemy.”
Second, I need to think about the fact that I am an enemy to someone else because of some category I am in. That makes me uneasy, to the say the least. I don’t want to be someone else’s enemy because of some category I am in—whether that’s “Christian” or “Catholic” or “American” or something else. But if I don’t want to be seen that way, maybe “my enemy” doesn’t want to be seen that way either just because of some category they find themselves in.
Finally, I need to act like a child of the God who showers sun and rain on us all. I need to start thinking of “my enemies” as also children of God. Maybe this means that when I see someone at the grocery store sporting a t-shirt that seems to indicate they are “my enemy”, I should treat them as a child of God. I could smile at them or hold the door open for them or say hello. It would be a start. And I could pray for them—for their good health and well-being and peace.
In these days in which polarization is on the rise and we are all being urged to think of this or that group as our enemy (even our arch enemy), following Jesus’ command to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute us may be just the thing that saves us from ourselves.
- Sue Trollinger