Rising to the level of love

A Reflection for Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here. 

I have never been slapped in the face, but in my many years of playing soccer, I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of a fair number of fouls. And my instinctive response to such affronts was never, “Thank you, may I have another.”

So I can only imagine how outrageous Jesus’ admonishment to turn the other cheek must have sounded to a people living under the daily humiliations of Roman occupation. How can the one who promises to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth—a realm where peace and justice reign—also tell us to “offer no resistance to one who is evil”? It does not sound like a great game plan. 

And yet someone closer to our time, who knew very well what it meant to be humiliated and oppressed, took Jesus at his word. In his sermon on “Loving Your Enemies,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argues that in telling us to love those who persecute us, Jesus, “far from being an impractical idealist…has become the practical realist.”

Dr. King offers three “practical” ways to love our enemy. First, look at yourself. Yes, the enemy is slapping me now, but have I insulted him in some way that I don’t even remember—“might [there] be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual”? 

Next, he says, we must recognize that while a civil war between good and evil rages in the hearts of all men, in every face you will find the image of God, “an element of goodness that he can never slough off.” Pay attention to that goodness. 

Dr. King’s last piece of advice: “When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.” That is, do not kick them when they’re down.

When it was said, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the hope was to avoid a spiral of retaliation that led to even greater violence. But Dr. King, following Jesus, was not simply seeking to avoid violence. He was seeking to redeem a sinful society and transform those who would deny his humanity. And he knew the only way to do that was to love them:

When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

Jesus does not want us to be indifferent to evil or to ignore injustice. But he does tell us to question our initial instinct to lash out against another when we feel we have been wronged. What evil have I done? What good is there in my enemy? What more can I do to break the cycle of violence and build up God’s kingdom?  

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