Archbishop_Daniel_Pilarczyk_2007

The Gospel reading today emphasizes the importance of loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. We are called to treat others as God treats us, with love, forgiveness, and without discrimination. Love is a decision to want and do what is good for someone, regardless of our personal feelings or their actions. We are called to love all people, even those who have wronged us. This is a challenging task, but with the strength and guidance of Jesus, we are capable of carrying it out. On this day of spiritual intensity, the Church's liturgy gives us a very important reading from the Gospel according to Matthew. It's a stern reading, and yet it's a reading of fundamental importance to our lives as Christian believers. Fundamental. Love your enemies, Jesus says. Pray for your persecutors. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. What Jesus is saying here is that we are called to treat other people the same way that God treats us. And if we're going to understand what that means, we have to reflect a bit first about how God does treat us. There are at least three things that we have to be aware of about God if we want to understand how Jesus is calling on us to behave. First of all, God loves us. God loves all of us. And if God didn't love us, and if we weren't precious to God, we wouldn't even be here. Every person who exists is the result of God's love. Every person who exists is the object of God's love. Secondly, we don't have to earn God's love. God doesn't love us because we are good. Rather, we are able to be good because God has loved us first. And to think that we have to deserve God's attention or that we are able to lodge a claim on God's attention is to misunderstand our whole existence. God's love is free and freely given. We don't have to buy it. Thirdly, God forgives us. Forgiveness means loving somebody in spite of the bad that that person has done. We are all sinners, but God loves us anyway. He loves us when we are good and when we are bad and when we are fervent and when we are indifferent. There is nothing that we can do to make God stop loving us, which is another way of saying that God always forgives. God loves us all. God loves us apart from our worth. God loves us in spite of our sinfulness. And today in the gospel reading, Jesus tells us that the way in which God loves us is supposed to be the way in which we are to love God's other daughters and sons. Before we see what that means in practice, we have to clarify a little bit what love is. Love is not the same thing as affection. We have affection for somebody when we feel good about them, when we are naturally attracted to them, when we like them. Love is something other than that. Love is a decision. It's a decision to want what is good for somebody, a decision to do what is good for somebody. Affection can be an accompaniment to love, but it's not the same thing as loving. Love is something that we are in charge of, something that we are responsible for. And love comes from our will, not from our heart. So when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as God loves us, Jesus means that we are supposed to want what is good for our neighbor and do what is good for our neighbor, whether we happen to like our neighbor or not. Affection is not the issue. Love is the issue. So now let's see how we are supposed to love as God loves. First, Jesus tells us today that just as God loves all of us, so we are supposed to love all our neighbors. There is nobody that we are allowed to disregard, nobody that we are allowed to despise. If God loves them, we're supposed to love them, to want and do what is good for them. Friends and enemies, white and black and brown and yellow, rich and poor, pleasant and unpleasant, we're called to love them all. Secondly, this implies that we don't have to wait for people to have some kind of personal claim on us before we reach out to them. They don't have to earn our attention and our regard. There is no particular virtue, Jesus tells us, in loving only people who love us or in loving those only who are worthy of our attention. God doesn't put that kind of limit on His love and He doesn't expect us to put that kind of limit on our love either. Does that mean that I'm supposed to love people I don't even know? Yes, it does. Does it mean that I'm supposed to love tramps and winos and junkies? Yes, it does. Does it mean that I'm supposed to be concerned about Cousin Mary and Uncle Charlie and the man down the street, all of whom are stupid and boring people? I'm afraid the answer is yes. Thirdly, finally, loving as God loves us means that we even have to include people who have done us wrong. We are called to forgive, to love people in spite of what they've done for us. There is nobody, nobody who has done us so much wrong that it's okay for us to write them off. We are called to love as God loves and God never writes anybody off. God forgives and so must we. Now that's a pretty stiff agenda, to want what is good and do what is good to everybody, whether they deserve it or not, even if they have done bad to us. And to carry out that agenda, we need the strength and the guidance of the Lord Jesus who lives in our hearts. We need the guidance and the strength of the Christ who spent his life concerned about the people around him, the Christ who died praying for his executioners. But it's that Christ who teaches us here today, who has been teaching us here all day. It's that Christ who comes to us in Holy Communion to nourish us and enliven us and direct us. Jesus never asks us to do anything without also making us capable of carrying it out. And today, Jesus says to us, to each one of us, people on the ground floor and the balcony and the stage and over with the musicians, Jesus says to each one of us, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Now let us pray for our needs and the needs of all God's people. Our response is, Lord, hear our prayer.