7th Sunday Year C, 2025

 

(1Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38) 

Today’s Gospel tells us of Our Lord devoting Himself to teaching His disciples with the following essential teaching expressed in most carefully chosen words:
 
 I say to you who hear, Love your enemies do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
 
He went on to give various illustrations of the general trend of His thinking – not examples for direct imitation – before, finally, returning once again to His original words and the most succinct expression of the essence of His teaching:
 
Love your enemies, and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return, … and you will be sons of the Most High.
 
St. Paul in the second reading set before us – as only he could -- the background for those divine words:
 
Just as we have born the image of the man of dust (sinful Adam) so shall also (sic!) bear the image of the man of heaven (Our Lord, Jesus Christ).
 
Going back hundreds of years into the millennia  of Israel’s preparation as People of God, our first reading gave us a most beautiful foreshadowing of Our Lord’s teaching, in the words of the very human David, a man struggling, in his very human weakness to follow the leading of his heavenly star;  a struggling man, deliberately chosen as such to serve in preparation for His Lord Who would Himself come on earth, in sublime fulfilment, as full and perfect Man:
 
As your life was precious this day in my sight, so may my life be precious in the sight of the Lord.
 
Notice that Our Lord spoke explicitly, “I say”, to those “Who hear”:
 
            LOVE your enemies, and DO GOOD expecting nothing (earthly) in return.
 
He speaks of what is divine, using divinely fashioned-and-intended words, to those who -- thanks to His saving grace, the “Gift” of His Most Holy Spirit -- will alone be able to  understand aright the intention of that divine command, will alone be able to learn from Him their Lord and Saviour, how to exercise divine love, here on earth:
 
            LOVE  even your enemies, and DO GOOD expecting nothing (from men).
 
Dear friends in Jesus, can anyone -- seeing our world today, hearing those claiming to be its leading, i.e. most powerful, representatives -- fail to SEE, HEAR, and ACKNOWLEDGE, the hypocrisy and  devilish pride of modern disbelief which, though denying Christ as Saviour, ‘religiously’ prepares’ -- each Christmas and Easter -- gift’s for those innocents still being born in its midst; a pride which “oh so boldly” promises to bring peace and fulfilment to those older ones whose faithlessness is leaving them -- however learned and cultured -- upon the shores of modern worldly experience like whales which have followed currents of deceit, falsehood and pride to a ‘dragged-out’ death,  and the horror of cultural corruption.