FAUSTO GOMEZ OP
Roberto Carlos sings in his popular song “El Progreso”: “I would like to be able to embrace my greatest enemy” (“Yo quisiera poder abrazar mi mayor enemigo”). The Prophet of Nazareth says to his followers: “Love your enemies.” But is it possible really?
Love means wishing good to another… doing good to others. It helps if those who possess it can withdraw from themselves, their massive egos and selfish love. By nature, the human person longs for happiness. Only real love can make us, relatively but, truly happy in this earthly life. Human life means learning to love – and to love more in an ever-ascending manner. Indeed, “to be is to love,”and to live is to love: true love makes a person just, honest, free, responsible and compassionate.
Love is the greatest human value and virtue: love as philia, or friendship (affective love), and as agape, or unconditional generous love (supreme benevolent love) to all, which includes enemies. In Christian tradition, love as charity – God’s love in us – is considered “the form,” the mother and driver of all virtues. It gives life to all other virtues and permeates them with peace, joy and mercy. Affective love is directed toward our relatives and friends: it is natural to love them. Agapeic love is directed toward those nearest and dearest to us, as also others, including the poor and our enemies, who we love truly albeit differently.
God loves his whole creation. He loves all humans, who are not only his creatures but also his children. God has no enemies, because He loves all and hates no one. Believers – Christians are asked by their faith to imitate God’s universal love, in which all are included: the good and the bad, women and men, black and white, children and the elderly, saints and sinners, the poor and the rich.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loves all. His followers have a primary commandment: love God and your neighbor, including one’s enemies. For those who believe in Jesus, a universal love that excludes no one is strengthened by divine grace and charity, implored of God by prayer.
St. Paul writes: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal 5:14). This entails loving also those who hate us. With hatred in our hearts, we cannot love our enemies. On the contrary, with love in our hearts, our enemies cease to be our enemies and become our brothers and sisters in Christ, the Savior of all. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that Jesus’ commandment “love your enemies” means “to hate not the person but his sin.” Hate the sin, but love the sinner; hate evil, flee the Evil One, Satan, the Tempter who “like a roaring lion prowls around looking for someone to devour” (1 Pt 5:8).
Christ asked his followers to love their enemies: “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, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:43-45); pray for those who maltreat us (Lk 6:27-28; cf. Lk 23:34). Jesus, then, asks his disciples today to love their enemies, to forgive them and to pray for them. For, in the wise words of W. Barclay, “No one can pray for another man and still hate him.”
Given our inclination to selfishness, anger and impatience, it is very difficult for us – with the weak power of our wounded nature – to love our enemies and not to hate them. As Linus says to Lucy, his sister, in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, “I love mankind … it’s people I can’t stand!!” A bystander: “I love my enemies, except those who have treated me badly.” Excluding some enemies from love is selective and, therefore, non-Christian: Christian love – charity – is not selective, but universal.
The positive formulation of the Golden Rule, the universal ethical norm affirms: “Do to others as you want others to do to you.” Jesus invites all to practice the Golden Rule (cf. Mt 7:12), and goes beyond its ethics of reciprocity to his ethics of agape, or unconditional love, and thus completes and perfects the Golden Rule when he says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”) (Mt 5:44).
Words to ponder: “The highest type of brotherly love is to love our enemies and there is no greater encouragement to do this than the remembrance of the wondrous patience exercised by him who, fairest of the sons of men, offered his gracious face to be spat upon by his enemies… Hearing that wondrous voice, full of gentleness and love, saying, ‘Father, forgive them,’ who would not immediately embrace his enemies? The Lord even made excuses for those who crucified him … To love his brethren even more perfectly, he [the disciple] should open his arms to embrace even his enemies” (St. Aelred, Abbot, The Mirror of Charity).
Is it very hard to love our enemies, or the Cains of our time, or particularly this or that enemy? Yes, of course. We have, fortunately, help available, if we want it. Christ gave us the commandment of loving our enemies and, therefore, He gives us the grace we need to carry it outin our life with our modest cooperation. Jesus told us, “Without me you can do nothing,” and Matthew closes his Gospel with these marvelous words of Jesus: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of time” (Mt 28:20).
One marvelous example of loving our enemies is the martyr and saint Archbishop Oscar Romero. The Archbishop of El Salvador preached: “I don’t hate my enemies. I don’t want revenge. I wish them no harm. I beg them to be converted, to come to be happy with the happiness of the faithful people.”
In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes: “Blessed be he who loves thee, and who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake.”
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