2 Cor. 6:16-7:1; Luke 6:31-36
We live in a
time in which many people think that it is somehow virtuous to hate, condemn,
and wish the very worst for people they consider their enemies for whatever
reason. Since every human person is a
living icon of God, there is nothing more dangerous to our souls than to
embrace such wickedness in our hearts. The Lord said, “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8) There is perhaps no greater test of
the purity of our hearts than whether we respond with love and forgiveness to
those who have wronged us, as He did to those who crucified Him, saying
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Lk. 23:34) As Orthodox Christians, our calling is
nothing less than to embody the mercy of God from the very depths of our being.
That sublime vocation goes well beyond being an outwardly religious or moral
person who feels justified in determining who deserves our good will, care, and
forgiveness. As those who share in the
life of God by grace as “partakers of the divine nature,” we must love all our
neighbors as He has loved us.
In today’s
gospel reading, the Lord spoke words that have always been hard to hear: “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 St. 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, including religion,
politics, and ethnicity. (Matt. 5:43)
Instead, the Savior calls His followers to be in communion with Him from the
depths of our hearts to the point that we embody the divine mercy, loving our
enemies like God, Who cares even for “the ungrateful and selfish.” That means that He cares even for people like
me and you.
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 obviously requires much more than
the culturally accommodated religiosity that is all around us. To love our enemies as He loves us requires
our deep spiritual transformation and healing as living icons of God. We must not, then, rest content with
confessing Orthodox dogma, coming to Church, devoting ourselves to prayer,
fasting, and almsgiving, and avoiding the most obvious forms of sin in our
outward behavior. These endeavors are
all virtuous and we must not neglect or diminish them in any way. We must remember, however, that they provide
the foundation and structure of our life in Christ. It is through them that we open ourselves to
receive the strength that we need to take up the difficult struggle each day to
reject the habits of thought, word, and deed that so easily lead us to treat
our neighbors according to our passions and not according to the mercy of the
Lord. We must do the hard work of actually
engaging the battle to live faithfully each day. If we do not and persist in refusing
to love others as Christ has loved us, we will weaken ourselves spiritually to
the point that we will find it simply impossible to love God, for “If anyone
says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does
not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”
(1Jn. 4:20)
St. Silouan the
Athonite provides good advice on how to grow in love for those who offend us:
I beseech you,
put this to the test. When a man
affronts you or brings dishonor on your head, or takes what is yours, or
persecutes the Church, pray to the Lord, saying: “O Lord, we are all Thy
creatures. Have pity on Thy servants,
and turn their hearts to repentance,” and you will be aware of grace in your
soul. To begin with constrain your heart
to love enemies, and the Lord, seeing your good will, will help you in all
things, and experience itself will show you the way. But the man who thinks with malice of his
enemies has not God’s love within him, and does not know God.[1]
It
would be hard to overstate how radically countercultural such an approach is in
light of the incessant calls to grievance, vengeance, and division that bombard
us. So many people proudly proclaim today
that to be true to ourselves means to celebrate and inflame our passions,
especially when that leads to the perverse pleasure of exalting ourselves and demonizing
others. St. Paul’s plea to the confused
Gentile Christians of Corinth is surely one that we need to hear: “Brethren, we
are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and move
among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore come out from them, and be separate
from them,’ says the Lord, ‘and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the
Lord Almighty.’” Note that the Apostle addresses Gentile converts who had
fallen back into many forms of corruption as “the temple of the living
God.” They were not simply people living
in a given time and place with a certain set of temptations and weaknesses but
truly the Body of Christ by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. He applies instructions from the Old
Testament on the importance of God’s children separating themselves from
worldly corruption to them as he admonishes them to embrace the calling to live
faithfully as who they had become in Christ.
Like the
confused, divided, and compromised Christians of Corinth, we must refuse to engage
in popular cultural practices that so easily corrupt our faithfulness to the
Lord as living members of His Body, the Church.
We are “the temple of the living God” in which all the divisions fueled
by fear, resentment, and the refusal to forgive may be overcome. Like the Corinthians, however, we so easily
fall back into the old ways of sin when we refuse to keep a close watch on the
thoughts of our hearts and to reject those that keep us from seeing anyone as a
neighbor who bears God’s image just as we do. Obvious and subtle temptations
are all around us to refuse to treat at least some of our neighbors as we would
like them to treat us. We may not
worship in the pagan temples of Corinth, but the spiritual gravity is the same
when we give ourselves to the false gods of our passions that blind us to what
it means to live as "sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the
ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful,
even as your Father is merciful.”
Like it or not,
the true state of our souls is revealed by how we treat those we find it hardest
to love. That is why we must be on guard against obsessing about the failings
of people who have wronged us and cultivating fear and anger toward those who
are on the other side of any division or argument. We must remember that we are
each “the chief of sinners” and share in the life of Christ by His grace, not
according to our personal accomplishments or opinions. As with the rest of the Christian life, the challenge
is not to see and treat others in light of our passions but as God sees and
treats us all according to His love.
That being the case, we must take up the struggle in thought, word, and
deed each day of our lives to “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body
and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”
