The perfect solution

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:43-48) lays down another set of challenges for us all of which lie beyond our ken and our capacities. Love those who are our enemies? Pray for those who persecute us? How can we humans manage these movements of the heart so contrary to self-preservation? Maybe tax collectors and pagans only love those who love them but is there not a certain justice in that, Lord, we wonder? Then, finally, Jesus lays down His last injunction to blow our minds: be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect. Thanks, Jesus, we say. We should be able to fit that in the diary, right between walking on water and raising the dead.

How can we make sense of all these commands from the Lord? What does He mean by even placing these burdens on our shoulders? Does He not know how much we have been hurt by our enemies? Does our dignity mean so little to Him? And anyway, doesn’t He quite like the tax collectors, enough to want to dine with them anyway? With these and a thousand other excuses, we shift the burden of the yoke of the Lord away from our shoulders. And yet it is to us that He addresses these words, and especially to those among us who have felt the hard blade of hatred or the cold steel of indifference, especially to those of us whose wounds are fresh from the latest attack that struck us just when we thought that the barrage of the enemy had reached a lull. Why now, Lord, another blow upon a bruise, more salt in the wound, further trauma for our troubled souls?

Let us not try to answer these many questions with reason, but rather with love.  The heart of the gospel is not a code of ethics, but the invitation to communion and friendship with the Blessed Trinity. It is because of that friendship that then we live the ethics. This is a friendship and communion that go beyond even the union of the spouses in a marriage, the nearest thing we know, a shadow of His deepest commitment and dedication to us. The commands of the Sermon on the Mount are meant to bring order but the essence of that order lies in this living, loving reality of God’s life that is poured out and offered for us: blazing like a brazier in the symbol of the Sacred Heart, illuminating and warming like the rising Sun of which we sing during the days before Christmas in the cold darkness of our world. The inner logic of Christianity is not legalism but the desire of an Eternal Heart to share itself with us. And, this is why St Paul prays

that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray, he says, that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.  

If we place our ears now, very close to the beating heart of Christ in our prayer, in the Holy Rosary of She who made His heart, who bore His heart and knew Him the best, we can hear its rhythm, why can attend to its whisperings, and we can with His help make sense of all the chaos in us that makes us wonder what He means by asking us to love our enemies.

And, having listened, we can turn again, away from ourselves, and towards Him; away from ourselves, and towards those whom He loves as He loves us, towards the tax collectors and pagans, towards those who still sit in the shadow of death and deal with the world through its cold logic, in its irrational and violent excesses, or else in its bullying and exacting efficiency.

Jesus does not ask us to obey His commands out of our nothingness, but out of the abundance that He wishes to give us; He does not ask us to obey His commands out of our own sufficiency, but out of the fruitfulness that comes from His life. Agere sequitur esse - doing follows being - in the logic of the scholastics, and its meaning is born out here in this relationship between His life in us and our obedience to His commands.

He must increase and we must decrease, and yet in another way, we decrease only because we are meant to become more like Him, more in harmony with the One who loved us first, more assumed into the ecology of His love and grace. And everything that holds us back, everything that trammels our freedom and weighs down our souls, can then be thrown into a bonfire of our vanities to be destroyed in His love. This is the logic of the incarnation, and of the incarnational at the service of the apostolic. For when we are made like Him through His grace, His sacraments, through prayer where we commune with Our Saviour, then, the call to be perfect as our heavenly Father is not so much an impossible and absurd imposition but an urging to follow the path with Christ, even to Calvary, even to the Cross, so as to rise with Him in the fulness of Resurrection.

Call us forth from our darkness and death, Lord, for we long to be with you.