In today's Gospel passage, Jesus gives us this command: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). His words might strike us as a tall order. How could we possibly even approximate an attribute of God?
The Second Reading for this Sunday points toward the answer. We are to bear the image of Christ in our being. The more we are rooted in Christ, the more we allow the grace of God to fill us, the more God's attributes will shine out from us. To be like God, we must conform ourselves to Christ, who is God incarnate.
At the heart of being conformed to Christ is learning how to love with God's love. God is absolute, infinite, eternal love. God always responds with love. Those who are cut off from God's love end up in that tragic state not because God does not love them but because they choose to reject God's love through their own free will.
God always returns good for evil. Some of the specific actions Jesus instructs us to undertake in this passage would require an examination of the cultural customs of his time to understand more fully. But suffice it to say for this reflection that, like God Himself, we are to answer evil with love. No matter how much evil we encounter, we must respond with love.
The message of Christ is the single most radical message in human history. No human culture has produced the concept of loving those who hate us. The post-Christian society we live in still has what Bishop Barron calls echoes of Christianity. Our broader culture still values, to varying degrees, the love of enemies. But we don't have to look far outside of cultures influenced by Christianity to see that returning hate for hate is the expectation in non-Christian cultural contexts.
Indeed, human history has been characterized by a cycle of violence. One group does something horrible to another, which group then responds with something even more horrible, to which the first group reacts with even more evil. Thus the cycle goes on. That is human history in a nutshell.
But God's love counters this destructive cycle. In Old Testament times, God gave the command an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth (Exodus 21:23-25). At first sight, this command might seem to encourage returning hate for hate in revenge. But the goal of this command was to limit the degree of retribution one could exact, making it equal in degree to the injury sustained.
In the New Testament, Christ goes even further. He tells us not to take revenge at all but to respond to hate with love. By doing so, by returning love for hate, we break the cycle of violence. We might think of the cycle of violence as a bouncy ball that bounces back every time we throw it against the wall. But imagine a moment when the ball does not bounce at all. The cycle is then broken.
Love takes us away from the preoccupation with striking back. Love creates new life that can blossom. Love gives us freedom. Without love, we are bound by the hatred of others. When we hold a grudge and seek revenge, we are controlled by the hateful actions of those who had hurt us. Our thoughts, our desires, our resources, our time, our energy - all this is held captive by their actions. Sometimes they might not even remember what they had done or even who we are. But we are stuck in the mire of wanting to get back at them. As it has been said, holding a grudge is like locking ourselves in a cage and throwing away the key or taking poison and hoping the other person will die.
When we forgive and respond with love, we cast off the chains of hatred. By choosing love, we are saying that we refuse to be enslaved by the hurt that others had caused us. We refuse to be controlled by their negative behavior toward us. Instead, we claim our freedom, our own agency. By loving in return, we take our lives back from those who sought to damage or even destroy us.
In the First Reading, we see David, who is a biblical forerunner and prefiguring of Christ, acting out of the principle of love. Saul is seeking him, desiring to kill him. All of a sudden, David has an opportunity to kill Saul. But he decides against it, offering love instead of hate. Saul rejects his love, which eventually leads to his own death and to David becoming king. Choosing hatred causes Saul to lose all that he had been given. Choosing love sets David on the path to receive the lavish blessings that had been prophesied for him.
A prominent contemporary story of forgiveness took place in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in Amish country in 2006. On the morning of October 2, a non-Amish man entered a one-room Amish school house and shot 10 girls, murdering five of them. He then committed suicide. The horrific tragedy would have destroyed most communities, setting in motion generations of deeply dysfunctional behavior. But the Amish came together as a community and decided to forgive the killer. They attended his funeral. They consoled his family. They even held a fundraiser to help the man's mother. By choosing love, the Amish showed how to be merciful as our Father is merciful. We are called to do likewise.
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The readings for The Epiphany of the Lord, Cycle C, are:
1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23
Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 8, 10, 12-13
1 Corinthians 15:45-49
Luke 6:27-38
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: The Crufixion German Tapestry Wikimedia Commons.
