Prepare the Way of the Lord: Love Thine Enemies

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,

will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills

and go in search of the stray?

And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it

than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.

In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father

that one of these little ones be lost."  Matthew 18:12-14

As part of my reflection on the readings for December 11, 2012, I have a confession to make.  I am addicted to twitter and Facebook.  I am also addicted to reading stories involving faith reported by mainstream media.  I then love to read the comments posted on those stories.  There is absolutely no surprise for me in what I read.  I will almost always find comments that extremely critical of religion and Christianity.  Some comments are incredibly vicious and needlessly mean.  One in particular is an opinion posted in CNN’s Belief Blog, “MyTake:  No pressure, Mr. President.”  The article is by Eric Metaxas speaking about loving your enemy and how the President at the National Prayer Breakfast embraced some of these ideals and turned around to allow his campaign to introduce some controversial campaign tactics.  I am not here to critique this article or its content, save one idea.  Eric Metaxas hit the nail on the head when he said that: “I talked specifically about the idea of loving our enemies. I said this was the test of real faith.”

As this is the season of Advent, we reflect and contemplate on the coming of the Lord and how we ought to order our lives.  Our readings today give us great clarity into the love of God, the Father, and how he will come and look for us, the lost.  In the first reading, from the Prophet, Isaiah, we hear that we can be comforted; that our guilt has been extinguished by God.  The interesting thing here is the nature of the love of God.  We believe that when Jesus Christ died on cross, he bore all the sins of humanity.  In the words of the Prophet, the expiation borne of the sins of Jerusalem was doubled by the hand of the Lord.  The Prophet tells us that, in a sense, God has taken our sin and then some more.  This lends to the mystery of what kind of Love would trade heaven’s throne for a cross?  This love is a great meditation for advent as we reflect on the grace given by the salvation earned through saving act of Christ.  And we hear in Advent, prepare the way of the Lord.  We prepare the way of the Lord by listening to God and hearing how we are to live out in our lives the call to which each of us receives uniquely from God.  The second half of preparing for the Lord is to take what we hear and act upon it in our lives.  Hearing the word of the Lord is not good enough; accepting the word of the Lord is not good enough.  What matters is having our outward actions reflect the internal movements of our souls.  We must strive to act in a way which brings glory to the Lord. 

Today’s gospel reading is from the Gospel according to St Matthew.  Jesus offers a parable a about the depth of the love of God.  The parable tells us that out of love for one sheep, a shepherd will leave all the others to find one that goes astray.  The shepherd rejoices more for the one who was lost than the others who stayed.  The Lord rejoices over us who turn and return to the Lord.  Because the Lord tells us that it is not the Father’s will that we should be lost, we can rejoice that God continues to seek us out and call us to conversion. 

It is this constancy from the Lord that makes me mourn the commentary on many articles I read online.  It also provides me with a great hope for the world because the Lord does not stop seeking us out.  The love of God is made manifest through the Mass in the sacramental body and blood of Christ.  We also experience God, knowingly and unknowingly, when we choose to act in love.  The awesomeness of God, for me, is that the people who appear most destructive with regard to faith and religion, in choosing to love, actually participate in the life of God.  The Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, that “He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.”  Love is a response to love, which we as Christians accept as God.  It is my hope and consolation that as those who ridicule my faith and yours, one day find as they love the people in their lives come to realize that God does exist and that they come to love God as they realize the love of God in their own lives. 

In the most concrete way, we can demonstrate how we order our lives and how well we have prepared the way of the Lord by how we love our enemies.  It is not difficult to love those we don’t know nor is it difficult to love the people we love.  The great challenge to loving neighbor as self comes when that person has declared us to be the enemy.  We must respond to the abyss of evil and hatred with an overwhelming abyss of love.