In today’s gospel reading Jesus makes one of the most radically challenging demands in Scripture: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” If we’re honest with ourselves, this is very intimidating.
At the Last Supper Jesus told His apostles: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). Jesus lived out this teaching the very next day on the cross. But He did not die just for His friends, He died also for His enemies: “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son” (Rom 5:10). In His death Jesus invites all mankind to be not only His friends, but also His brothers and sisters — and through Him “children of the Most High.”
So the concept of loving our enemies is not built on some sort of perverse divine masochism, but on the fact that Christ died for us all — friends and enemies — and invites us to share in His sacrificial love. So just as He allowed His enemies to not only crucify Him, but also curse Him, strip Him of His clothes and strike Him, He tells us in turn: “bless those who curse you…from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic…. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well,” and just as He looked down from the cross and said: “Father, forgive them” (Lk 23:43), He tells us: “Pardon, and you shall be pardoned.”
These are hard demands. But we have to remember two important things. First, Jesus is giving examples, not legislation. Does Jesus really, literally, mean that every time someone hits us we have to let him keep hitting us? Why not walk away, or say something to calm him down, or to help him recognize his sin?
What Christ is demanding in these radical examples is that all of our actions should be made in the context of love, even if it means we have to suffer or sacrifice. The first response to an enemy should be patience and forbearance, but sometimes — in love — we have to respond in other ways. Sometimes love requires standing quietly while others attack us, as Jesus did when the Romans scourged and mocked Him (Mt 27:26-30). Sometimes love requires walking away, as Jesus did when the Nazareans tried to throw Him from the cliff (Lk 4:28-30). Sometimes love requires us to correct our enemy, as Jesus did when He told the officer who struck Him at His trial before the Sanhedrin: “if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike Me?” (Jn 18:23). Sometimes it may even require fighting back, as Jesus did when He drove the moneychangers from the temple (Jn 2: 13-17). 
But whatever we do, it must be done out of a love which is willing to suffer — sacrificial love.
There’s also a second important factor to remember when we consider the hardness of these sayings. By our baptism we receive a share in the very life of Christ Himself — we are not merely friends or even family, we are members of His Body. And in the Eucharist Christ unites our acts of sacrificial love to His own perfect loving sacrifice of the cross, and fills us with His grace in “good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing.”
To love our enemies is a daunting task, but the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ, poured out on the cross for all mankind, makes even this possible.
Fr. De Celles is Parochial Vicar of St. Michael Parish in Annandale.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
