In today’s gospel (Mt 5:43-48) Jesus gives us in His ongoing Sermon on the Mount what is for me probably the most counterintuitive (and difficult) commandment in all of the gospels.
Some might even think it more than a little insane.
(First, we need to remember that in this context love is to ‘wish the good of the other’, not to have the exact same feelings toward every other that we have towards those family and friends that are close to us.)
An approach to this injunction that I find very helpful is to consider the alternative to His words: hate your enemies. This, after all, comes very naturally to us.
But what does this look like? What are the consequences of following this much more ‘sensible and natural’ course of action?
I think we need only look at human history for the answer to this question. That is, literally millennia of wars, death, destruction, hatred, and other such ‘good’ things. Is this the ‘better’ way to go? Are we better off following this path? Is this the lesson of human history, that death and destruction leave us better off?
Or is it that maybe Jesus is not the crazy one?
I’m not suggesting that this is easy; I am suggesting that it is more sensible. And perhaps even more self-serving in the long run?
Also in this same passage Jesus says about His Father-
“His sun rises on the bad and the good,
He rains on the just and the unjust.”
Jesus gives us here a glimpse into the nature of God that challenges us greatly. God does NOT divide us into ‘us’ and ‘them’. He treats and loves us all equally. If this were not the case, His sun would rise only on the good, His rain fall only on the just.