7th Sunday Ordinary Time

To you who hear me, I say: love your enemies.  Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you and pray for those who mistreat you.  Luke 6:27-8
I am not certain if we realize it or not, but the biblical command to love ones enemies, is unique to the Christian tradition. 
No other faith carries in its teachings that direct command.
And yet I would dare say that it is also one of the commands of which we speak the least, ponder rarely, and dialogue about even less.
I wonder why?
Is it because to live this command of Jesus is one of the hardest tasks of our human experience?
Is it because we would prefer to forget, or downplay this one unique command?
Is it because we often fail to live into the holiness it invites us to live into?
Or is it maybe because it can almost seem impossible to comprehend that even we have the capacity to love like God does?
I have struggled with this concept and living it myself.
My spiritual directors over the years have given me many hints on how to step into  this holiness and the greatest has come to me in the form of an invitation.
I was sharing with my spiritual director a particularly deep and fatal wound that I had experienced at the hands of another.  It was so painful that every fiber of my being wanted revenge, retribution and retaliation.  My Irish temperament was screaming to be released and my ego was I thought damaged beyond imagination.
My Spiritual Director listened to me for months, over and over I would share the pain, the hurt the desire for revenge.
He always invited me to forgiveness and prayer….until I finally said….listen…every time you invite me to forgiveness and prayer I get madder and madder!  I feel like a failure because I can see myself getting there and I certainly am not ready for that.
He said…perfect!  That is precisely what I have been trying to get you to realize.  Now I can invite you to pray for the desire to love that person. 
It is not until you admit your powerlessness to achieve forgiveness on your own that God’s grace has room to come in.
So now begin to pray for what you really want…the desire to be able to live free from the anger, resentment, regret and hate.  Then…eventually, with God’s grace, it will happen.
I said, well why didn’t you just say that to me months ago…and he said…your pain was so great and so deep, you could not have heard your own words.  Healing takes time.  God is patient, you need to be  too!
It is too bad that this passage and the Matthean passage have been misused by clergy and counselors alike in the care of clients in abusive relationships.
Believe me to love does not mean that we must put ourselves, our lives, our egos or our self in harms way….that is not love….that is abuse.  We are commanded to love, not to subjectify ourselves to abuse. 
We can love another from a distance and not place ourselves in relationship to the one or ones who are causing us harm.
To love someone does not mean to not hold them accountable for their words and actions, in fact sometimes the most loving thing we can do for another is to hold them accountable.
Mahatma Gandhi the Hindu leader and activist said..the Bhagavad-Gita is enlightened by the sayings of Jesus
The closest any other faith tradition has come to this command to love our enemies came from
Guatama Buddha (c. 563/480 BCE – c. 483/400 BCE), hundreds of years before the Jesus character, taught much the same principal:

“Hatred will not cease by hatred, but by love alone. This is the ancient law.”

I wonder how we can keep living that law?  It is an invitation!