Jesus today presents such strong ethical injunctions we may think they cannot possibly apply in the real world, cannot, apart from wishful hope, apply to us. They fly in the face of our natural, our instinctual self: turning the other cheek to be hit again, accepting the theft of what is ours, giving to everyone who asks. None of this comes naturally to us, none of these sit well with our regular, natural sense of self.
Our natural sense of self comes from our growing and maturation, from our families, our friends and our society. All these help to form our sense of self where we know somewhat of who we are, but definitely what is ours – our family, our loved ones, our house, our job, our car, our bank accounts, our bodies, our lives.
Our natural self understands the world: we do things and then receive things in return. We act and things happen, we do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, we sin or transgress and are punished.
Our natural self does not incline towards the radical self-sacrifice Jesus calls us to, where we act for nothing in return.
However, our natural self which knows what belongs to it – body, house, wealth – this self is actually created by the world and will one day, in this life or at death, dissolve and disappear.
And it is only the loss of this self, the loss of our false, worldly selves that will allow us to fully enter the radical love of Jesus: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you”.
Or to be the love required for us to “do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return”.
And so, Jesus calls us to a new self, and from that new self, a new ethic, a new way of being in the world and ultimately, to a new world – a world whose contours are sketched out in our Gospel today, a world that we are all invited to, a world that we will all one day inhabit.
All this begins with the opening words of our Gospel: But I say to you who are listening. You who are listening.
Let’s remember our context here. Jesus has previously called his disciples, his students, up the mountain, chosen 12 of them to be Apostles and then returned. On the plain, he heals not only Apostle and students but also a multitude of people, Gentile and Jew, outsider and insider alike. And this healing foreshadows the radical ethics in our Gospel today: it occurs without ANY action or commitment or even response on behalf of those needing healing. He heals all without qualification or expectation of any return.
He then, lowering himself, directly addresses his students to pronounce blessings and woes which startle and shock us – the poor have the Kingdom, the rich already have all they will ever have.
It is only then, after the healing of the many and the teaching of his students that we hear ‘I say to you who are listening’.
There is a focusing here: from the many who are healed, to the students who are taught, to the students who are actually listening – the ones who are paying attention, who are focused, who are centred in love on the one who is Love before them.
It is this focusing, this centring on Christ that is the key.
We all know there is a world of difference between simply hearing something, or someone, and actively listening. When we listen, when we attend, when we pay attention something remarkable happens – that to which we pay attention becomes real to us, real to all of us, body, mind and spirit.
This is the essence of the crucial practice of Christian meditation, and indeed our liturgy we work together as One Body each Sunday. When we attend mindfully, when we offer our full consciousness to Christ, then Christ becomes present to us, for us and within us.
And it is this attended-to presence of Christ, of God, within our lives which will bring about the death of the older, false self, and the rising birth of the new self. In C.S. Lewis’s words, our new, Christ centred self “will come when we are looking for Him”.
This new self, because we attend to Christ, because we are listening, this new self will partake of Christ and will in some measure be Christ. And to this new self, the radical call to “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” is not impossible – because Christ loved his enemies even to death, even to death on a cross.
And, of course, this is not easy.
Paying attention, paying real attention, even in our most intimate and personal relationships is one of the hardest things we will ever do – much less as a Christian practice of meditation for 20 minutes on a hard chair in time carved out of our busy lives. And there are so, so many distractions within us and without us.
There are even distractions from the Christian tradition itself, teachings and ideologies that seek to subvert and co-opt the radical Christ-call to love our enemies.
A dangerous example of these modern views was espoused recently by American Vice-President JD Vance. Though a Roman Catholic, Vance somehow believes that our Christian Love should be ordered, should be controlled:
“We should love our family first, then our neighbours, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”
For the Jesus of love, speaking in love, on the plain, this is utter nonsense.
Vance here has reproduced the hierarchy of love typified in the circles of holiness of the Jerusalem temple we heard last week. Jesus completely and forever dismantles these inner and outer circles, healing all, blessing all and teaching all equally. The command, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” is not qualified or modified by the proximity of the “others” to our lives. We do not “do” differently to our family and to the unmet seeker of asylum; we are called to love all, including our enemies.
So, as wonderful as our Church is, we need to remember we are always a union of divine grace and human, sometimes very human, forces.
But these external distractions and impositions to our attention on Christ are nothing compared with our own internal distractions and barriers.
As soon as we try to attend fully to Christ, to be one of the ones who are listening, to sit still in meditation, to focus inwardly on the liturgy, we will encounter obstacle after obstacle. Our mind will wander, our body will ache, emails left unanswered will arise, shopping to be done will make itself known. We will be swamped with disruptions. This is simply, though so powerfully, our old, worldly self, not wanting to die to the new Christ self, the new self that can and will love enemies.
So, we will fail. Over and over, we will fail to live into the ethics we heard today. Failure though is no reason not to try, no reason not to try and listen rather than simply hear.
Remarkably though, our failures are also part of our becoming.
We fail because we are human, just as Christ is also fully human. So even in failure we can find Christ, even in failure we can attend to Christ, and even in failure – failure at listening, at attending, in meditation or liturgy, even in our failure Christ is present to us and Christ is birthing in us the new self, the new self of love for enemies, the new self of the Kingdom.
In his Name, Amen.