(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.
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.
LOVE even your enemies, and DO GOOD expecting nothing (from men).
