February 24, 2025
Jesus talks about how essential love is in our lives, particularly extending love to those who oppose us. This kind of love seems harder now than ever before. Here’s a short meditation, reflecting on this week’s Sunday reading:
We are often shocked by acts of violence. When mass shootings occur, we ask ourselves how something like this can happen. We are embarrassed to realize that more mass acts of violence happen in our country than any other. Recently, we have even seen automobiles being driven into crowds by drivers looking to kill people. We are surprised at this violence even though violence and anger is everywhere around us, from the way we drive, to our social media, to the shows we watch on TV.
What would you do if someone was out to kill you, was chasing you from one area to another, and encouraging others to kill you as well? What if you found this person and cornered him, and you had a weapon in your hand? We would expect that our enemy would be killed. Yet the first reading gives us just this situation and David, who has a perfect chance to kill Saul who has been chasing him, refuses to kill his enemy. If anyone could justify a killing, it would be David.
This shocking scene from the first reading helps us prepare for the shocking language of Jesus in today’s Gospel. “Love your enemy,” we hear and it has a nice sound about it. Because the word “enemy” has a distant feel about it. But Jesus is insisting that we behave in a way that almost contradicts our basic instincts. “Pray for those who persecute you,” says Jesus. “Pray for those who hate you.”
The reason Jesus says this is very important. We think our anger gives us a certain entitlement, a certain justification for the negative feelings we have. “Look at what this person did to me. And you expect me to sit there and do nothing?” But Jesus points to God, his Father, as the reason why we need to put anger aside. Look how much God tolerates from us! And yet this does not stop God’s love and care. “God lets his rain fall on the good and the bad; on the just and the unjust.” If this is how God is, then in what way does our anger give us permission to behave differently from God’s behavior?
This language of Jesus pushes us also into another area of reflection. We sit around, holding and heating up our anger. Yet how have we been treated by God? Is not every one of us an object of God’s forgiveness and mercy? If I presume God’s forgiveness of me, why should I not presume God’s forgiveness of others, and, therefore, my obligation to forgive as well?
This may sound like God is asking us not to be ourselves. Indeed, God is. Paul makes it clear in the short passage we have today: God is asking us to become new persons, new persons in the New Person that Jesus is. God is asking us not to live according to the self-centeredness of the first Adam, but according to the universal love of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ.
We have today many more ways to express anger. Our mass communication and our use of social media can create empires of anger. And this anger only begets other anger in return, an unending spiral of venom. Mercy and forgiveness are the only way to stop that spiral and end the cycle. To be unable to see and live by mercy and forgiveness is, Jesus says, to be unable to even know who God is.
Paulist Fr. Frank DeSiano is a Paulist missionary based in New York City.