The Greatest Test of our Souls is Whether We Love our Enemies: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost and the Second Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Cor. 6:16-7:1; Luke 6:31-36

    One of the great challenges that many of us face in embracing Orthodox Christianity is getting over some form of religious legalism, which is the belief that how we relate to God is primarily a matter of obeying rules that govern how we behave. Of course, how we treat people every day is a vital dimension of faithfulness to Christ, Who intensified the requirements of the Old Testament commandments, for example, against murder and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount. He did so, however, not by lengthening the list of bad things that good people should not do. Instead, He went to the very heart of the matter: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8)

    The laws of the Old Testament were necessary to make clear to the Hebrew people the basics of how they were to act as those in a covenantal relation with God. Jesus Christ is not simply a religious teacher, but truly the God-Man in Whom the ancient promises, laws, and prophecies are fulfilled. He is a Person in Whose life we share as those who are in communion with Him as living members of His Body, the Church. The Church is the bride of Christ and we must live as those in a “one flesh” union with Him in which we become “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.

    It is only in this context that we can understand our Lord’s teaching in today’s gospel teaching: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” In this passage from the gospel according to Luke, Christ does not rest content with calling His followers to limit their vengeance to “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” even though that Old Testament principle had placed needed restraint on vengeance. (Matt. 5:38) He did not affirm the common attitude of the time, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” an attitude that unfortunately remains with us today in so many ways. (Matt. 5:43) Instead, the Savior called His followers to be united with Him from the depths of their hearts to the point that they embodied the divine mercy, loving their enemies like God, Who cares for “the ungrateful and the selfish.”

    To become a person so radiant with the love of Christ that we convey His love even to people we do not like and who do not like us is obviously not a matter of meeting a basic legal standard of outward behavior. To love our enemies as He loves us requires our deep spiritual transformation and healing as living icons of God. It is not enough to be kind to our friends, to those we think will return our good will, or to those with whom we have something in common according to conventional social standards. It is not enough simply to restrain ourselves from abusing our enemies or even to go through the motions of being decent toward them. No, we must become brilliant with the gracious divine energies to the point that we convey the merciful love of Christ to everyone.

    If we approach this sublime calling merely as a matter of obeying a religious law, we will either fall into despair or delusion about our ability to fulfill it. The vocation to become like God in mercy and holiness is obviously something we cannot accomplish by willpower or behavior modification alone. And if we think we have already done so, then we have become blinded by spiritual pride to the point that we do not see ourselves clearly at all. The fact that we seem inevitably to fall short of loving our neighbors, and especially our enemies, as ourselves indicates that we have a truly eternal vocation that we should never think that we have completed. The struggle that we all have in treating other people, especially our enemies, as we would like to be treated, reveals that we have not yet embraced fully the Lord’s gracious healing of our souls. St. Silouan the Athonite saw the love of enemies as a clear sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. He taught that when the soul “grows humble, the Lord gives her His grace, and then she prays for her enemies as for herself, and sheds scalding tears for the whole world.” These words reveal our need for ongoing repentance as we turn away from fueling the passions that make it so appealing to condemn others and turn humbly toward cooperating with the Lord’s gracious healing of our souls. That is the only way for us to share so fully in the life of Christ that we embody His boundless mercy.

    Today’s epistle reading reinforces the profundity of this spiritual calling, for St. Paul addresses the terribly confused and compromised Gentile Christian of Corinth as “the temple of the living God.” The Corinthians were largely converts from paganism who had to be corrected at every turn from their tendency to fall back into their pagan ways of worshiping false gods and engaging in gross sexual immorality. St. Paul quotes Hebrew prophets who admonished the Jews to be entirely separate from the corrupt ways of other peoples. What is so shocking is that he applied that instruction to the Gentile Christians of Corinth. Those who had been hated enemies for their immorality and paganism are now themselves “the temple of the living God” in Jesus Christ. They are His people, His sons and daughters, to whom the promises of Abraham have been extended through faith. Because of this great dignity, St. Paul tells them to be clean “from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”

    While the apostle did provide them with clear instructions on how to live as Christians, Paul was anything but a legalist who thought that the following a code of behavior had the power to heal the soul. As he wrote to the Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:8-10) Neither Jew nor Gentile could earn salvation by their own merit, but by embracing the gracious healing of the soul through faith in Christ. Such gracious healing is not passive or abstract but participatory and transformative, for we are all fellow workers with God who must “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” (Philipp. 2:12-13)

    If we are to find the healing of our souls, we must struggle to do what we can each day to treat those we are most inclined to disregard and condemn as we would like them to treat us. We must take every opportunity to convey the mercy we have received from Christ to our neighbors, especially those we consider our enemies. When we fail to do so, we must use our weakness to fuel our humility before the Lord and our sense of unworthiness to judge anyone else. We must pray, fast, give to the needy, and mindfully reject the nonsense in our own minds, and in all factions of our culture today, that would encourage us to treat anyone as anything less than a living icon of God. As hard as it is to accept, whether we are sharing in the life of Christ is most clearly revealed in how we treat those we find it hardest to love. This is not a matter of legalism, but of whether we are acquiring the purity of heart necessary to see God, especially as He is present to us each day of our lives in those we are least inclined to see as beloved neighbors. That is the ultimate test of whether we are making “holiness perfect in the fear of God.”