Today’s gospel (Mt 5:43-48) helps me out a bit with yesterday’s.First, it goes along way to answering the question, “So just who are my brothers and sisters” (Cf. Mt 5:23-24)?Well, quite frankly it seems Jesus means everybody.After all, just who is it that the sun shines on when it shines if not everybody (Mt 5:45)?So there it is, everyone is included and Jesus demands that I live in harmony with them.Second, it goes along way to answering the question as to how to be reconciled, how to love the ones who have set themselves up as my enemies.“Pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44).
This call to pray, I think, is important and perhaps its implications are not so easily or immediately grasped.It says a lot, again, about the nature of Jesus’ teaching.It sets it on the fundamental foundation for the type of ethic Jesus establishes for his kingdom.You see, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes in particular, is not some super-charged version of the Ten Commandments.In other words, we are not simply to take the precepts of the Sermon, set them alongside the Ten Commandments, and conclude that Jesus has just given us a harder ethic to live by which simply calls for greater effort.Jesus’ Sermon is not, let this be clear, about working harder to please God!
Well, if this is true, then what is it?Because certainly the Sermon on the Mount does intensify, specify and amplify so much of what is already contained in the Covenant with the People of Israel.How is it not to be understood as simply demanding more from the People of the New Way?
“Let it be said again:If we are clear about this first, we avoid the misunderstanding that we human beings can, by our own strength, heal all human wounds, eliminate all unjust conditions, create a final state of rest, peace, and welfare…For Jesus, the issue is the crossing of all boundaries, the victory of a conduct governed by law and justice, the surpassing of all previous rules of conduct established by human beings.That is the meaning of his extreme instructions, or, as we could also say, his ‘radical’ demands which penetrate to the roots of the human heart.He establishes them in view of God’s incomprehensible conduct in spite of all earthly difficulties, detached from all otherwise human considerations and objections.It is a supreme moral appeal as a result of his union with God and his will.This must be established with all clarity and urgency before we turn to the question of how these demands by Jesus can be realized in earthly situations.First we must be gripped by Jesus’ optimism which grows out of his trust in God and his salvific power: ‘All things are possible to the one who believes’” (Schnackenburg, All Things are Possible to Believers, 34).
This underlines why prayer for one’s enemies is the key to reconciliation with one’s enemies.Prayer, unceasing, places us before the heart of the Father.It is only by the action and the power of his divine Holy Spirit that we can hope to love as he loves, to cross boundaries that only he can cross.In prayer the possibility is created for our hearts to be caught up in the enormity of God’s power to heal and reconcile.
Prayer is the key.Let us make no mistake about it, though, it is the key because it is a real thing.To pray is to really encounter the Father of Jesus Christ.That is to say, ultimately, that it will in fact change us!It will move me to love my enemies, to step over myself, and to be reconciled!God reconciling the world, in the end, to himself through me!