Homily for Saturday, 28 February 2015‒Saturday of the First Week of Lent

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 26:16-19; Psalm 119:1-2, 4-5, 7-8; Matthew 5:43-48

“I say to you, ‘Love your enemies.’” Might this be one of the most difficult of our Lord’s commandments to keep?

And yet Jesus is adamant in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew: For if [we] love” only “those who love” us, “what is unusual about that”? What good is it to love and to be kind only to those who return our love and kindness? In the words of many youth after falling for peer pressure, “Everybody does this”!

But to love only those who love us is not God’s way; the way of God who, Jesus says, “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Has Jesus set our moral standard too high when he urges us, “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”?

Jesus calls us as baptized Christians to rise above the excuse that “everybody does it”; to let our Christian identity stand out as a light to our world. Each and every one of us is called to holiness; to be like God: “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To be sure, this commandment of Christ is not only one of the most difficult we have to keep; it is impossible for us to keep without God’s grace. Who here is “perfect, just as [our] heavenly Father is perfect”? Our imperfection is why we have God’s grace available to us, especially through our Church’s sacraments; through Reconciliation and our Eucharist. God’s grace is available to us through our journey of Lent.

Even so, this commandment of Jesus was difficult to keep in his own time. The teaching we hear in today’s Gospel was Jesus’ response to a teaching of his day’s best moral teachers: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” Love your neighbor, Jesus says, and “love your enemy,” too. Indeed, if we have enemies at all, we have not fully lived up to our Christian calling; our love is not fully like God’s love. This is how radical Jesus’ teaching was and is.

And Jesus’ teaching has only become more difficult in our time. Gone are the days, if they ever existed, when in the words of The Godfather: Part II, we could “hold [our] friends close and [our] enemies closer.” We live in a time of divided families; an ideologically divided nation and its political institutions; divisions that have even crept into our Church. We live in a world of fear in which our enemies are more difficult to define: Not nation states, but groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

But Bishop Angaelos, Coptic Orthodox leader in the United Kingdom, said this about ISIS’ murder of twenty-one Coptic Christians in Libya nine days ago: “I have a responsibility to myself and to others to guide them down this path of forgiveness… We don't forgive the act because the act is heinous. But we do forgive the killers from the depths of our hearts.”

“Love your enemies… “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Like Bishop Angaelos, we can live this commandment of Christ, if only by God’s grace.