Today's Gospel is simultaneously most difficult and most central to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. How can you tell if a place is heavenly? A place is heavenly to the extent that its inhabitants love their enemies, do good toward those who hate them, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who mistreat them. If that is how people act, then where such people dwell is heavenly. If that is not how people act, then we have not yet gotten to the point where "[t]he kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord."
Today's gospel starts with the central, defining message of what it means to follow Jesus, to dwell in the reign of God, to "be saved":
Love your enemies.
Love your enemies.
Love your enemies.
Now how in hell are we supposed to do that?
Now I say that partly for shock value, but also I say that because it's literally the challenge. A world not driven by a love of enemies is, in fact, hellish. And our redemption is nothing more and nothing less that learning, practicing, living, being transformed, in such a hellish world, into people who do love their enemies. The world’s redemption, the apocatastasis or restoration of all things for which God longs – it is the same transformation of all dwellers in the world.
Our salvation and the salvation of the world is precisely living out an answer to the question "how *in hell* are we supposed to love our enemies?"
And to answer that question, we need to define love.
We can quote scripture, we can read theologians, we can open the dictionary, and all those things have shaped my understanding of what love is, but the definition I'm going to give you today is experiential. After 48 years as a human being, experiencing love as a child and a friend and a part of the church and communities and raising kids and caring for pets and holding people's hands while they die and being in and out of a marriage and teaching and leading parishes and being in relationship with parents and siblings and family and friends, and being in the presence of God in prayer and word and sacrament and in the world, this is what I've come up with. My working definition of love is that to love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them.
Love is giving the dog a bath in tomato juice after the skunk sprayed them when you were about to leave for church on Palm Sunday, it's holding someone's hand as they cry, it's changing a diaper in the middle of the night, it's singing to someone as they fall asleep and holding their hand as it turns cold and the beeping of the hospital heart monitor says they've left this world and gone on to whatever is beyond. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them.
If love is about warm fuzzy feelings, we likely can't summon that for our enemies. But Jesus doesn't tell us we have to like our enemies. We don't have to enjoy spending time with them, or smile when we see them. But if love is not feeling but action rooted in a genuine desire for someone's good, we just might be able to do that, even for those who have mistreated us and who continue to curse us.
The current Vice President of the United States recently ventured into the realm of moral theology and claimed there's "a very Christian concept" that "You love your family and *then* you love your neighbor, and *then* you love your community, and *then* you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then *after that*, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world." When challenged by actual theologians, he doubled down and referred to the concept of the `ordo amoris`, which Augustine of Hippo and later Thomas Aquinas both discussed: the "order of love." The Vice President asserted that a person has a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away, and therefore, by analogy, the rest of his moral hierarchy also holds. And I would argue that he's not wrong that one does indeed have a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away. But not because of the sort of hierarchy of obligations he suggests.
Dorothy Day wrote that "The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the _deserving_ and the _undeserving poor_." I would extend that further: the Gospel takes away our right to discriminate at all between those deserving and undeserving of our love. There is, in fact, a hierarchy of *urgency* in terms of the actions of our love, but it is not about to whom we owe care and service based on relationship nor past service they have rendered to us, nor what we hope to expect from them in the future,, nor tribe or any sort. Our obligation to desire someone's well-being is universal, but our obligation to have that desire direct our particular actions is focused not on bonds of kin or tribe or webs of past or future obligation, but on whom we are uniquely positioned to help.
That aid that we are uniquely positioned to be able to offer is the aid that we are most obligated to undertake. We have a special obligation to feed our children not because we are related to them but because they are uniquely dependent on us. We have an obligation to provide consolation and support to our friends and partners because the life history we share enables us to understand and care for them in ways others cannot. The loving service that can only be given by us is the loving service we have the most particular obligation to undertake. This is how self care fits into this hierarchy: if there is love that we can show ourselves that others cannot do for us, we have a special obligation to act in pursuit of that love.
We are called to desire what is good for everyone. Love is more than just desiring good for someone; it is acting, on the desire for good for a specific person in a particular place at a particular time. Vaguely wanting good for people is the baseline, but love-in-action is when that desire for people's good translates into specific decisions about how we act.
Then today's Gospel reminds us that this prioritization of action might be differentiated by our ability to make an impact but Jesus calls us to **not** let how much we _like_ someone enter into the hierarchy of priorities. We may not let the ill that someone has done to us in the past, or even the ill that they are doing to us in the present change their place in the hierarchy of action. If we are well positioned to act for someone's true well being, we are obligated to act on it, regardless of how much we like that person, how they have treated us in the past or treat us in the present, regardless of any expectation that they will help us in the future.
We often do have a greater obligation to act for the wellbeing of those whose lives are closely linked with ours. And sometimes those whose lives are closely linked with ours are, in fact, the ones who have done the most evil to us. The story of Joseph and his brothers that we heard the conclusion to as our first reading certainly illustrates that.
But I need to make clear what love of enemies is **not**. Loving our enemies does **not** mean embracing their agenda. We are called to love persons. We are called to desire what is good for a person, and to act on that desire. But if their agenda is evil, loving them doesn't mean promoting their agenda. In fact, it might mean opposing it. If someone has power, and is using that power to hurt people, it may well be the case that removing that person from power is promoting what is good for them. Loving our enemies might well mean opposing them, working to frustrate their plans, working against what they might *think* their interests are. But it cannot mean wishing for them to suffer or hoping for their eternal doom. We cannot give up a genuine care for what is truly good for them, and we can never will their suffering as an end.
We are called to oppose evil, but not to oppose the people who do evil. We must desire good even for evildoers. And this is good because far too often, we **are** evildoers. It's easy to sort the world into good guys and bad guys but each of us do evil. When we persevere in resisting evil, we live out our baptismal covenant. If we condemn evildoers, we condemn ourselves. Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (sole-jha-NEET-sin) wrote that "[t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either--but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts." When we love our enemies, we act in the hope that they, and we, and all people will turn away from evil and do good. We act confident that through God, _all_ creation is redeemable. No one and nothing exists beyond God's power to save.
When I was a child, every night I would pray for the repose of the souls of Judas Iscariot and Adolf Hitler. I certainly wasn't condoning their actions. I picked them because they were the two most evil people I could then imagine. I prayed for them in part because I believed that if they could eventually be redeemed and enter the reign of God, we all would be likely to do the same. I prayed that in the end, hell be empty. To love our enemies must at a minimum mean to never give up the hope of their redemption, to write no one off as unforgivable, irredeemable, outside God's love, or ours.
Which brings us back to the psalmist.
Do not fret yourself because of evildoers;
do not be jealous of those who do wrong.
For they shall soon wither like the grass,
and like the green grass fade away.
I need to start with a disclaimer here. It's not so much that I practice what I preach but that I preach what I need to practice. I am spending a lot of time this month fretting myself because of evildoers. The evil being done right now by people in positions of power to hurt the vulnerable and to wield power with explicit cruelness is causing me to do a whole lot of fretting. I'm certainly not jealous of the harm they are doing, but I am jealous of the power they hold and the ability to change things that they seem to currently enjoy but are choosing to use to inflict suffering. I find myself going back to the well that is the psalms again and again to draw deep nourishment in trying times. Morning after morning, night after night, the psalmist has been offering the words I need to hear to sustain me through these trying times. It is not because I am good at this, but precisely because I am not that I keep coming back to this prayer: Do not fret yourself because of evildoers.
But if we love our enemies, this takes on another layer of meaning: "do not fret yourself because of evildoers" means yes, do not worry that they will remain in power forever, but also, if we love them, do not fret that they are beyond redemption. To pray that wicked soon wither like the grass does not have to mean we fail to love them. To pray that the wicked soon wither like the grass does not mean we pray for their suffering or their destruction. We must indeed pray for their redemption. It is good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people to proclaim that God casts down the mighty from the throne and sends the rich away empty. When we are mighty ones on the throne, when we are rich ones who hoard what others need to survive -- accusations that cling to me all too closely -- it is a blessing indeed to be separated from our ability to do harm. It is the first step on our road to redemption to pull us away from the evil we do. Do not fret yourself because of evildoers -- do not fret that they are condemned to remain as evildoers forever. Do not fret that their hearts will forever be hardened. Their power will fade, their ability to do evil will wither like the grass. God is already at work in accomplishing their salvation, just as God is at work in accomplishing ours.
Prayer is good, and stories are powerful.
Love does not end with prayers and stories;
love is action rooted in those stories and prayers.
We can pray that God will cast the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, but can we participate in God's action? Do we have opportunities to resist the evil in the world? The spiritual forces that Jesus's followers have turned to across the centuries to strengthen us in resisting evil have been prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I will talk more about those as we approach Lent, but there is a particular fasting opportunity we could join in this week to resist the evil at play right now.
This coming Friday, February 28, is a day that various organizers have called for as an economic blackout. A day to fast from spending money, at all if possible, or only on those most urgent emergency needs if necessary. The followers of Jesus's way have long observed Fridays as a day to refrain from various forms of consumption to mark that it was on a Friday that the powers and principalities of the empire of this world put Jesus to death to try to assert their claim to relevance. It is meet and right that we prayerfully consider this invitation to fast from consumer spending this Friday so that our prayers that the world might change might turn to action in bringing to birth a gentler, more loving, more humane world fit for God's creatures.
Amen.
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