Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (C): Luke 6:27-38
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect – from My Back Pages, by Bob Dylan
Love your enemies.
Offer the other cheek as well.
Lend expecting nothing back.
We are all quite familiar with these words, and with similar teachings of Jesus found elsewhere in the Gospels. We quote these words. We honor them in various ways. We do not often live according to them, however. More often, our mottoes seem to be more like this:
Fight fire with fire.
An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.
I have a right to everything that belongs to me.
We want to protect and defend ourselves against anyone who might harm us. We want to give offenders a taste of their own medicine. We get angry when others attack our reputation and make us look bad in front of others, or ridicule us in some way. In fact we are more than willing to threaten people with MORE than an eye for an eye, and MORE than a tooth for a tooth, to deter them from trying to harm us in any way, or take anything from us that we feel we need.
We regard the words of Jesus in our Gospel reading as impractical at best, naïve at worst. Life just isn’t like that, we say. Why, we say to ourselves, if people actually lived like that, others would take advantage of them and rob them blind! We find ways to ignore Jesus’ words, so that we can live as though He had not said them. Or, we claim that His words are unrealistic. Impossible. No one can actually live this way.
But do our usual tit-for-tat responses, our love of revenge and lawsuits, or our threats against any real or potential enemies do us any real good? If they are “the way life is”, why are so many people so angry all the time? Why are so many dissatisfied with their lives? Why do so many feel anxious or depressed, even when there is no evident physical or psychological problem that is causing this? Why is it that even when our usual behaviors of revenge and defense fail to bring us joy, we stick with them, believing that we need them? After all, isn’t one definition of insanity the insistence on sticking with one solution again and again, even when it never solves the problem at hand?
Could it be that we haven’t given the words of Jesus a real chance? After all, as G.K. Chesterton explained, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
How, then, can we truly listen to Jesus’ challenging words now, in our own lives as they are?
Let’s put it differently. How does Jesus want us to hear His words to us today?
Notice that, as our Gospel passage begins, Jesus says to His disciples, “To you who hear, I say…” You who hear.
Hear what?
Well, what Jesus has said right before this passage – or, the Gospel reading for last Sunday. We heard “Blessed are you who are poor… woe to you who are rich”; “Blessed are you who are now hungry… woe to you who are filled now”; “Blessed are you who are now weeping… woe to you who laugh now”; “Blessed are you when people hate you… woe to you when all speak well of you“.
Bishop Robert Barron tells us that we can translate these beatitudes in contemporary language in this way: “Blessed are you who are not addicted to possessions.” “Blessed are you who are not addicted to sensual pleasures.” “Blessed are you who are not addicted to pleasant feelings.” “Blessed are you who are not addicted to your reputation.”
Bishop Barron points out that our lives are often ruled by these (and similar) addictions. An addiction is any object or any activity that becomes far more important to us than it should be – to the point that our pursuit of the addiction causes great harm to ourselves and all who love us. The object or activity need not be bad in itself, although it can be. What happens is that we are convinced that we MUST have that object or that activity or that feeling AT ALL COSTS, and that we cannot survive without it. The addiction becomes the center of our lives.
Whatever the addiction is, however, it cannot satisfy us as our life’s center. Our hearts are far too vast. The addiction can’t possibly fill them. We sense this. Therefore, along with the addiction, we enter a scarcity mode. We are convinced that there is only so much good stuff in the world. Therefore, we must grab all we can, and dare not lose any. Our lives, we believe, depend on this. So, we fight and threaten and seek revenge in order to protect the addiction that cannot satisfy us, and that is slowly destroying us. It is when we see Jesus’ words through the eyes of our addictions that they appear to be impossible or impractical.
Jesus insists that it is precisely those who are NOT addicted who are blessed. We imagine that our addictions make life tolerable. In reality, they block us from life in its fullness – the life that only God can give, the life that God longs to give us. Jesus tells us that He came “so that my joy might be in you, and that your joy might be complete”. We need to identify our addictions and let go of them in order to receive the blessings that God promises us. As long as we cling to our addictions, our hands cannot receive God’s grace.
As Ruth Burrows says: “God cannot give himself to us unless our hands are empty to receive him. The deepest reason why so few of us are saints is because we will not let God love us. To be loved means a naked, defenseless surrender to all God is. It means a glad acceptance of our nothingness, a look fixed only on the God who gives, taking no account of the nothing to whom the gift is made.”
The idea is that we are so trusting in God’s love as the one thing we truly need that we can dare to let go of ANY addiction we have that blocks us from God’s love and grace. We trust that, if we commend ourselves to Him fully, His love will break the power of any addiction and show it for what it always was – a pitiful substitute for God! God can then fill us with the real thing – Himself!
Then and only then – once the illusions of our addictions are unmasked – can we truly see that God gives us everything, because God gives us His very self. If we are so blessed by God – or, in other words, if the Kingdom is truly within us – then we no longer see our lives in a framework of scarcity. No addiction can fill us, but God’s love does not merely fill us; it overflows. It expands our hearts. We are loved more than we dared imagine we could be. We discover, then, that we can love to a far greater extent than we ever thought possible. God is loving through our love, raising our love to unimaginable heights!
Now – once we have tasted such wondrous abundance, the words of Jesus in our Gospel passage no longer feel impossible. Jesus is teaching us to live, and to love, as freely as God does – undeterred by any result or any lack of results our love may find. Undeterred by even opposition or evil done against us. God is love. When we are in Him, we can love as He loves. Freely. Disinterestedly. Not enslaved by any addiction. Not deterred by a lack of affirmation or by overt hatred. We think, speak, and act out of that eternal, faithful well of Divine Love gushing forth from our hearts and souls. We are, at last, fully free to be who we are – sons and daughters of our Father, who makes His sun shine on just and unjust alike, and His rain fall on good and bad alike, in order that someone else might perceive such love and allow themselves to be loved, just as we do. What a great privilege and grace it is for any of us to become the means through which one other person might come to, or return to, our loving God! What joy we bring to God and to all in heaven!
Jesus Himself assures us: Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.
Love is gift. One can only receive it by giving it. The more one gives, the more one receives. Eventually, we are not aware of “giving” or even “receiving” any thing. It becomes all one Love. In that Love, all is possible. We can love our enemies. We can forgive all who ask for our forgiveness. We can give far more than is expected of us. We can deal with dishonor of every kind. We can lose our worldly reputation, but we cannot be stripped of Love – unless we walk away from it. Love never fails, as St. Paul reminds us.
If your hands are still clinging to some addiction, something that tells you that you cannot survive without it, let the Love of God speak to you. Trust that Love, the Love that longs to open your heart, to fill you, to heal you, to bring you unimaginable joy. In that Love, you will want to live out the words of Jesus in our Gospel passage. They will not only seem doable. They will seem obvious!