Love Your Enemies
Michiel Peeters - Jesus’ recommendations today seem impractical, almost unnatural, and, in any case, exaggerated. “Give to everyone who asks of you, and do not demand it back from the one who takes what is yours. And lend, expecting nothing back.” But especially this one: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. Love your enemies and do good to them.” To love is to desire someone’s happiness. An enemy is someone who tries to act against your happiness.
Christ says these things to people who attempted to live what is called the law of retaliation: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This rule, introduced by Moses, was an improvement. Before, when someone had harmed you, you would hurt them more. This gave rise to never-ending vendettas. The law of retaliation said that any injury should be compensated by inflicting exactly the same injury on the one who had inflicted it; then, the revenge should stop.
But nobody had ever said, “Love your enemies.” Only Jesus says this. And He adds, “Then you will be children of the Most High, for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
Our enemies—we know this well—are not abstract, faraway foes, but they are, in the first place, those close to us who harm or frustrate us daily. How is it possible to love them?
Let’s look at our experience. When can we give without asking anything back, even when they don’t thank us? When can we forgive? Only when we are very happy. Only when a person is happy himself can he forgive and even love his enemies.
Christianity is the religion of personal happiness and peace that are so great that they overflow to all others. And this happiness and peace are given by the lived awareness that we are “children of the Most High”—the lived awareness that we are children of the Most High. This lived awareness is the “good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, that is poured into the lap” of those who follow Christ, who verify Christ, who submit Christ’s words and deeds—Christ’s presence among us—to thorough verification. This verification of the present Christ is the origin of the equilibrium, tolerance, impartiality, and peace that characterize the saint, that is, the true woman or man, the conscious Christian.
Christianity is not ethics. It is the possibility of peace, of fulfillment in the present, given by a lived relationship with That for which our hearts are made. When this relationship is lived, in all circumstances, a person is so fulfilled, so much himself, so “overflowing,” that he himself is surprised to see that he desires the good even of those who hurt him. And this gratuitous love is a real new beginning in this world.
If this is true, let’s see what helps us, in our experience, to live this relationship.
The author has not revised the text and its translation.
