Bound in Love

The gospel this morning is taken from the sixth chapter of Luke, and it is a continuation of Jesus’ preaching on the Beatitudes. We get the word Beatitudes from the scriptures because Jesus makes a number of statements in which he starts with the words, “Blessed are you if…” St. Thomas Aquinas explains beatitude this way: “a man’s happiness or beatitude consists in the vision whereby he sees God in His essence.”

In the verses today, Jesus gives commandments that he expects those who would be “blessed” to follow. He tells us to love our enemies. He tells us to do good to those who hate us. He tells us to offer a blessing on those who curse us, to pray for those who mistreat us.

Jesus understands that while these instructions may be simple, they are difficult. He takes the issue on directly, when he says that when you do good to those who have done good to you, it’s not really that much of a good after all. A good gift is a gift given freely and without expectation of something that will be given in return. If I give you a gift expecting that you’re going to give me a gift, what I have really done is proposed a trade. Trading is not the same thing as giving gifts. And Jesus promises us that we will get gifts. They will be a good measure, packed down together, and even overflowing.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we just cannot do what he wants of us by our own power. If I have an enemy, then I have someone who really does not like me. He is not even neutral regarding me. My enemy seeks harm for me. He wishes ill upon me. He is not looking out for me. He does not have my back. That is what makes him an enemy. What I really ought to do, is to keep a close eye on that enemy because I know I can’t trust him. But Jesus rejects that approach and tells me to love him. To love someone is to wish the good for that someone no matter what. It’s easy to love our spouses and our children, yet Jesus tells us we must love our enemies. Well I simply can’t do that by my own strength.

He tells us to pray for those who mistreat us. Again, I cannot do this by my own power. If you mistreat me, I remember every detail, and I spend a lot of mental energy at least considering some kind of revenge. I’m a nurse, but only for grudges. The natural justice, the justice that we find in the world as it is, is a brutal process of evening things out. We say to ourselves, “well he got justice, he got what’s coming to him.” That makes sense, and we can even find support for this approach in the Old Testament where we read about “an eye for an eye.”

Jesus comes to establish the New Testament covenant, which in many cases overwhelms the Old Testament. He brings supernatural justice, which is justice infused by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is a justice rooted in love. A justice that gives another his due — what he should have — but is founded upon love — willing the good for the other — is a justice that really cannot make sense to us in the world as we find it. But that is the justice Jesus came to establish.

Our Lord Jesus is love, and he is the son of justice. So the blessedness that he wishes for us, and instructs us to pursue, is a blessedness that we cannot fully experience in the world in which we live. And this can be frustrating until we remind ourselves that we were not made for this world but for the next. Our time in this world is a time of preparation for the eternity of the next world.

This means that the Beatitudes and the sermon that we hear today in the gospel are words of encouragement to persevere in our earthly struggle so that we can enjoy and savor the vision of God in heaven. The vision of God is also called the beatific vision, for it is what the blessed will get to see. St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians points out that now we see dimly but then we will see face to face. We will see God as he truly is when we behold the beatific vision.

So how do we get from here to there given that we don’t have the power to make the transformation? We find our answer in the Psalm today. The refrain is, “the Lord is kind and merciful.” The verses tell us how he is kind and merciful. He pardons all our iniquities. He redeems our lives from destruction. Not according to our sins does he deal with us.

Something greater than natural justice is at work so that we have the sure hope of the beatific vision at the general judgment. That great thing is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross. His offer of himself, and his willingness to take upon himself all the sins of all humanity from all ages, is how we are redeemed. We cannot get to heaven by our own power, so our loving father sends his only son to get us to heaven through his death and resurrection. We cannot do it, so he does it for us.

Jesus walked with his Apostles, but even they could not stand face to face and behold the vision of God at the Transfiguration. When Jesus took the three Apostles up Mount Tabor and was transfigured before them, they could not handle it. They fell down in fear and trembling. Peter blurted out they should build some huts. It was only after the Passion and even the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that they could begin to understand what they had seen on that mountain.

If we really understand what he did for us on the Cross, then the central activity of our lives should be crystal clear. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and our God, then we spend the rest of our lives thanking him for the gift of salvation in every day movements of forgiveness and love and prayers, for those who are easy to love and for those who are so difficult to love. When we understand what he did for us on the Cross, then our joy will be full, packed together, and overflowing. When we understand the power of his sacrifice on Calvary, then we can fully participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a spirit of thanksgiving and awe.

Those impossible tasks of loving our enemy will become possible through the gift of Jesus Christ. We no longer have to try to do it by ourselves by our own power. We just have to cooperate with him and his power. He is the pilot but he wants us to be his copilot. He determines the plan, and he controls the outcome, but we participate in the details along the way.

The process of becoming a bit more like Christ before we die is what St. Paul is talking about in the letter today. We are the fallen sons and daughters of Adam, the first man. But the second man, Jesus Christ, is our ticket to the purity we enjoyed before the Fall. By the power of Christ, we can be those good things the Psalm speaks of today: we can be crowned with kindness and compassion. We can be slow to anger. We can stop judging and condemning. We can, by participating in the life of Christ, become a little bit more like him. If we grow closer to him and become a bit more like him, then we can be blessed. We can see him face to face. We can finally behold the vision of God.