4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

When I was in the college seminary, at, more or less, the beginning of my journey to the priesthood, I started to experience a lot of doubts, which caused me to question my vocation.

So, every night before I went to bed, I would read our second reading today. I never truly understood why I chose that reading, but there was something inside of me that was eager to learn and to understand what it meant to love in the way that St. Paul is telling us we must love.

And, for a long time, it still didn’t make sense, I still couldn’t understand what he meant, just that we use it at weddings, until one day, when I was in class, our professor, who was also a priest, explained something I had never heard before, he said that St. Augustine would say that no one could truly achieve holiness or be fully perfected in the virtues unless they had love.

I then learned that St. Augustine wasn’t alone, that many saints believe that all virtue, all holiness relies upon love, and that without love we are and we live with nothing. St. Therese of the Little Flower would go so far as to say that: “without love all we do is worthless.”

Love, in their eyes, love as the saints saw and see it, is more than sentimentality or Hollywood romance, it is the very giving of ourselves, an outpouring of who we are completely to the other, so that, as St. Mother Teresa would often put it: “we give until it hurts.”

This is why St. Paul says that if love is not the foundation of our very lives, all things will ultimately fail. For, even the great virtues of faith and hope will, indeed, mean nothing and amount to nothing, if they are not driven by the virtue of love, by its embodiment in charity.

This is why St. Paul even goes so far as to say that in striving for all the spiritual gifts, this is still the most excellent way, and he says again and again that everything we do must, therefore, begin and end in love. And, if it doesn’t, then no matter what we do, whether by our speech or action, it becomes nothing more than noise, nothing more than a show; we become a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal, as he puts it.

We can prophecy, we can have great faith, give everything we own, and even move mountains, but will still be left with nothing, unless we do it in the name of love, unless we are motivated by love.

Because then love becomes more, it becomes an embodiment of who we are, the way God became an embodiment of love to us as He does in the Most Holy Eucharist. And, when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ we receive the fullness of love in Him who poured Himself out for our sake and for our sins, He who demonstrated the very pinnacle of love, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

And, it is when we receive Him, imitate Him, that we truly learn what it means to be patient, like Him who, who found His disciples asleep, or to be kind, like Him who was betrayed by His friends, or to be humble, like Him who could have declared His Kingship and could have put an end to everything, but instead submitted to everything that was to happen.

And, by doing so we can then have the strength and the courage necessary to bear all things, believe all things, hope in all things, and endure all things, because, indeed, love never fails, love, like that, is never conquered.

St. Paul reminds us that we still see indistinctly, as in a mirror, that is, we don’t see the entire picture, because we still have not seen God in His fullness, we still have not seen Him face to face, though, indeed, the Eucharist does bring us the closest.

And, based strictly upon the love that we experience from that Eucharist, we can only believe that we will be overwhelmed and enveloped by a love that nothing in this world could even come close to compare to, that even the greatest form of love that we can imagine pales in comparison to the love that awaits us.

So that, indeed, faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but, the greatest of these is love.

In our Gospel today, Jesus places before us a great challenge, to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, to seek what is seemingly impossible by loving not just those who love us back, but those who might very well hate us. Jesus is telling us to go beyond loving our neighbor and to love our very enemy as well.

What’s more is that it seems that He is telling us that in order to do this, we are, in his words to: “offer no resistance to one who is evil.” And, while it is true that Jesus always encourages the more non-violent approach, these three ways He gives us show a more creative way in which to deal with our enemy.

In fact, He challenges the very popular phrase at the time, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” with the suggestion that we give the other cheek. While, at the outset it may not seem too different, this is actually a gesture of defiance, because in order for one to be hit on the right cheek it would have to be done with the back of the right hand.

In biblical understanding, this was symbolically how a master might strike a slave. Therefore, when Jesus says we are to give the other cheek, the left cheek, this is a symbolic gesture of one being equal with the attacker. This puts the attacker in an awkward position, in trying to strike a second time, and, in fact, is actually a non-violent way of standing one’s ground and of refusing to be further insulted.

The same thing is true when Jesus encourages the handing over of one’s cloak as well as their tunic. In biblical times, the Jewish people wore two principal garments, an interior garment and an exterior. The interior was a tunic, it covered the whole body and extended down to the knees. The second garment was called a "cloak," or a mantle.

It was typically the wealthy who would be able to have a cloak, and, in fact, one’s wealth was judged on how many garments they wore. If a poor person, however, had a cloak, it might be the only one they had, and it was common for them to use them as a bedcovering.

Now, in the Biblical times if a poor person borrowed money they would use those garments as collateral for a loan, and if the person was really poor, they would use their cloak. On cold nights, they would need something to cover themselves with, so there was a requirement that the garment had be returned to the poor person every night for warmth. However, he was also required to return the garment each morning until the loan was paid back.

If these requirements were not met by either the poor person borrowing the money or the one lending the money, there would be a lawsuit.

What Jesus is saying then is that by giving their cloak and their tunic, they are giving everything they own, even the clothes upon their back.

In Israel, shame comes upon the person not who is naked but upon the one viewing the nakedness, so the humiliation then is on the accuser.

Lastly, a Roman soldier was allowed to have a slave carry his pack for only one mile, anything beyond that puts the soldier in violation of military law. Jesus then is putting the burden or the punishment on the soldier not the one who is “going the extra mile.”

In each case, Jesus is showing creative ways in which to not give up our dignity as humans and as Christians, but to non-violently oppose our accuser.

This is the way He is saying we are to respond to our enemy, but He is still asking us to love them.

The question then, is how do we love our enemy?

The typical response is that while we are obliged to love all, we don’t have to like them. That is, though we are not too fond of the person we wish them no harm or that nothing bad befall them.

And, while that is the general understanding of how it is we are to love our enemy, it still seems to fall short, because our enemy, no matter how much they hate us, is still a human being, our enemy is still one molded and shaped by the hand of God.

That is why Jesus shows us another way, by His example as he laid upon the Cross. Because, from the deepest recesses of His heart, He does not say: “Father, condemn them, let your wrath fall upon them,” or “strike them dead at this very moment,” no, His response is different, He says: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

He takes the very epitome of evil, the worst that humankind is capable of and He asks for forgiveness, He asks for sanctification, He asks that the most evil action become transformed and blessed by the Father.

Jesus then shows us that, indeed, it is possible to love our enemy, when we love the person with God, that the only way to love our enemy is to pray for them, because prayer is the greatest form of love that any of us can offer. It puts us at the heart of bringing those whom we cannot find forgiveness for, those whom we may hate or who, in turn, may hate us, and turns it into good, by blessing it, by blessing us, by blessing them.

Because, no matter the evil that was done, no matter the hate that exists, prayer levels the playing field, placing both our enemy and ourselves before God, placing us in the very presence of Love. So that while we stand in His presence, it becomes merely impossible to not love even our very enemy.

That is what Jesus means when He says we are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, because perfect love can only exist within God Himself, and if we seek to bring ourselves before Him who is Love, standing side by side with our enemy, in the end, we will see it is not just our neighbor whom we are to love but even, and most especially, our enemy as well.

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Lord, if you will (Sundays and Solemnities)

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