Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
To love our enemies
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect. Mt 5,43-48
We read and read again this passage from the gospel of Matthew and we realize that we have reached the springs of the more revolutionary thought which has ever been able to be conceived: the sources of the life and of the peace. Nobody before Jesus had come to consider the love and the forgiveness as the essence of the life. It may be that Socrates and the stoics of the ancient Greece have glimpsed something but they were just little flashes of light coming out through the cracks of a door. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, has opened the door of the love and of the forgiveness, to leave us dazzled by the emanating light. There are no alternatives: to resemble to our heavenly Father, who makes the sun rise for the all of us and sends the rain over the just and the unjust, and to achieve the peace of the heart, it is needed to love, to forgive and to pray for our persecutors. The only way to able to succeed is the prayer, even if, at the beginning, to start to pray for our enemies is neither easy nor natural. However, if we break the ice and we start, the Lord will give us, by his grace, feelings of love, forgiveness and peace, which otherwise would be not spontaneous. If we wonder why there are enemies, the only answer is: why the evil exists. However, in this great mystery which is the life, even the enemies, and sometimes more than of the friends themselves, are important for our spiritual journey and for the implementation of the project of life which the Lord has prepared for us. In the dynamics of the love, of the forgiveness and of the prayer, it happens in fact that the enemies are turned into brothers. Furthermore, it happens that sometimes the enemies are important for the putting into practice of our plan of life: when we go for wrong paths, they act, much more than our friends, to block the road. They do not do it to favour us, but they do, and,
without knowing or wanting to help us, they help us. In a spiritual journey everything works for the good.