Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
In my opinion, today’s readings contain the most challenging command in Christianity. Love your enemies. The logic is inescapable: God makes rain fall on the just and the unjust. God’s love is indiscriminate, and so our love should be indiscriminate. But it is so hard to love and pray for the people who we perceive to be our enemies. And in this part of the world, our personal enemies are (mostly) not trying to kill us or even seriously persecute us. The commandment is even harder for people in other places and times that are and were persecuted to the point of martyrdom.
In the first reading, we see Paul encouraging the Corinthians to love the way God calls us to love. It’s a concrete love of self-sacrifice. This love is done not out of a sense of duty, but generosity. We cannot be guilted into loving the way God wants us to love. A guilty love is not love. Guilty ‘love’ is at best simply duty and responsibility. The Macedonian Church that Paul is holding up as an example to the Corinthian Church was eager to give; they were begging for an opportunity to help support the persecuted Church in Jerusalem.
As if these admonitions were not enough, we see that the lectionary puts these two readings together. If the first informs the second, we can imagine that God may be encouraging us to eagerly seek out ways to show our enemies that we love them. But isn’t that how God loves us? Didn’t God send Jesus to redeem us while we were still enemies of God because of our obstinate desire to persist in sin? The Spirit today still meets us where we are, working on our hearts and pushing us towards transformative love. We are called to this, and it is not a duty or task. We must instead have hearts remade to truly love our enemies, to be hungry for their well-being. Only the Holy Spirit can transform our hearts to emit such a supernatural love and embody it in action. Lord, transform our hearts!
Chris Nieport