24 February 2019. (7th O. T.).
The word of God last Sunday showed us Jesus teaching the multitudes, and pointing out that living the Beatitudes is criteria of life for his followers, although this seems to us as going against the current in our world. If that seemed to us to be difficult, what can we say about what Jesus asks of us today? “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly”. “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.”
There are people who we don’t get on with, without knowing why. There are others that we reject out of hand because they are violent or for their selfish and unscrupulous behavior. We could say that “viscerally” we cannot love them; it is something greater than our forces. It is something that depends on what we feel, what we carry in our hearts, and we cannot prevent those feelings because they precede our will.
But what Jesus is asking us to do is to love them with the same love with which God loves us. And God does not love people for who they are or how they are, but he loves them for who He is. He does not love us because we are good, but because He is good. God’s love is a selfless love, free of charge, universal. Love can never be the result of a commandment. And for the followers of Jesus it has to be the consequence of a personal maturity, by an identification of our feelings with the feelings of God, “he makes his sun rise on the good and the bad”. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”, Jesusasks of us.
When we come to feel and recognize that God loves us personally, despite our many weaknesses, our imperfections, our sins, then we will be closer to understanding what God asks of us in relation to others. “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate; do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven”.
Juan Ramon Gomez Pascual, cmf
