12 September 2019
Thursday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
To follow Jesus, to truly follow Him, we must take up our crosses. But this is impossible if our hands and hearts are full of other things, if we are unwilling to surrender the things that prevent us from more fully loving Him. On Sunday He challenged us to renounce our worldly possessions, on Monday our pride, on Tuesday our comfort and way of life, on Wednesday our self-reliance and today He asks us to make perhaps the most difficult sacrifice yet: our prejudices.
Jesus’ teaching in our Gospel today is perhaps among the most difficult to follow of all His teachings. It is easier, one might say, to believe in the resurrection than it is to love one’s enemy. We all love to quote Jesus when He says “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another,” (John 13:34) yet when it comes to putting these words into practice, we struggle mightily. We wonder what that even looks like, and when we see it spelled out for us clearly in our Gospel today, we start to make excuses. “I’m not ready to forgive yet.” “I need more time.” “They aren’t even sorry for what they did.” “They started it.” The list goes on.
Imagine if Jesus, praying desperately in the Garden of Gethsemane, walked away from it all by making such excuses as we do! Imagine if He who said, “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first,” (John 15:18) decided that He would wait to redeem us when we decided to say collectively “We’re sorry!” Imagine if He who, upon the Cross, groaned with His last, merciful breath, “It is finished,” (John 19:30) threw down that Cross, crying out, “They started it!” (Genesis 3:6). In other words, imagine if Jesus had a heart like yours. Praise God that this isn’t so; rather “…God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us…while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son…” (Romans 5:8, 10).
Christianity is hard. How easily we forget that we march under the banner of the Cross: we follow the Crucified! Our King is not carried about on a couch of comfort, but on the timbers of torture, and though the Christian life is not meant to be entirely one of suffering and distress—indeed there is comfort and joy to be had as well!—we cannot forget the Cross. We cannot pretend that Christ suffered and died so that we don’t have to; indeed if we are truly His Body, doesn’t that mean we must share in His suffering? “…we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him,”(Romans 8:16-17).
As we consider today’s Gospel and all the challenges it lays before us—loving our enemies, lending freely, ceasing our judgement of others—let us remember the wise words of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” We will fail in perfectly living out the ideal, yes, but let us never, ever fail in one thing: trying.