[gromitt82]

Once again, on occasion of today’s Gospel, I feel like reverting to the subject of our alleged strong faith in God. And I say alleged, because I believe that, more often than not, we either DO NOT fully believe God actually exists or we DO, but at the same time, we pay little attention to His Commandments.
In today’s Gospel Jesus says “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved; he will go in and out freely and find food”.
Now, to enter through that Gate we have to follow His Commandments.
In a previous Gospel, Jesus states:
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command (John 15:9-14).
And this is precisely the point in question. This 11th Commandment is possible the one we pay less attention to. For, while we can claim that we love each other, we should add that this is so as long as we can choose the “other” parties. If we should truly believed in Jesus’ Words we could not have any enemies, or if we did, we could not hate them, or resent them, or misjudge them, or distrust them or, even worse, hurt or kill them.
But we do it all the time, since we wake up until we go to sleep, here, there and everywhere. As the saying goes, we argue that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”
An example of a 100% foolproof faith in God and subsequent compliance with His orders can be found when Abraham sets out to obey God's command without questioning but does not state in front of Isaac that he is the intended sacrifice, and it is only after Isaac is bound to an altar, that the angel of God stops Abraham at the last minute, saying that "now I know you fear God” (Gen. 22:5-8).
Right now, we are TOO civilized to believe that God really means it, when He orders us to love our enemies. We surely believe He actually means we must try to be as good as possible BUT if someone or somebody offends us or is rude to us (or to our country) we should protect our families and our belongings and God will understand in His infinite forgiveness.
Well, perhaps He will or perhaps He will not, for we should not forget that Christ died on the Cross while saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34).
What do you think?
Gromitt82

[jakester]

Gromitt - I think you may be a little hard on your antagonist... "whoever you are o, man."

I believe the commandment to love your enemies is one that we consider in the light of our human weakness. We have to work against our own flesh and persevere through it in order to fulfill the words of Christ.

For example, if I see you on the street and I come up to you and punch you in the face, will you break out into song? Will your lips praise God for the right cross you received to the cheek? If you answer yes to either of those, I don't know what to say.

I think that in order to take God seriously about loving our enemies, we have to have a strong frame of reference first. We have to understand enough of God's purposes to be able to even intellectually grasp why we should love our enemies. And then after pondering that idea, having opportunities in life to let things go when others wrong us... to keep wishing the good for others instead of evil.

But this subject is a two-edged sword. Forgiving one's enemy does not negate justice either in this world or in the world to come. Consider that the Psalms are littered with imprecatory ones. It is good for a nation to execute justice for the good of society, even though at an individual level an injustice can be overlooked.

Consider the Petit family from Connecticut. A lovely family they were... a doctor, his wife, and two daughters. They lived a very privileged life and yet they were humble people. Two men brutally raped and killed his wife and daughters and beat the doctor almost to death. Since that day, the doctor survived and has gone on with his life. He hasn't asked for their heads on a plate. He hasn't publicly shown his hatred or anger towards those men. He has humbly left justice in the hands of men and to God. But I don't get the impression that he wants to see those men burn in hell. I imagine that he sees fit to let God decide the fate of those men.

Even though Dr Petit could conceivably forgive those men and move on with his life, it would be wrong for society to just forgive the men and let them go free. Wisdom tells us that some people are bent on doing evil and we must protect ourselves from such people by administering justice and discouraging wrongdoers from doing evil through fear of punishment.

So, I don't think we can conceive of a reality in which someone's entire family can be brutally destroyed and the very next hour he is praying for his enemies. Being able to love your enemies is a deep and profound commitment that can only be reached through much wrestling and anguish. And remember what the writer of Hebrews says about Abraham with respect to Isaac:

'By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, 18 even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”[c] 19 Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.'

The point I'm making is that the Genesis account was brief concerning Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. We don't know much about what went into Abraham's thought process. But Abraham had to reason within himself about how God's promises would still be fulfilled if he killed Isaac. Do you think immediately after God tells Abraham to kill his son that he runs to find the nearest mountain to do the deed? It's an odd request from God and I think a rational person would struggle through such a request. But that's me. We know in the end Abraham was willing to do it but it's the getting from point A to B in his mind that a casual reading of the bible often misses.

I do agree with what you are saying but I feel that your tone is a little strong... so I am merely arguing for a balance towards your perspective. Those are my thoughts, though.

[Fr_Chuck]

Of course those same commandments as written are often viewed too independent, the same God also sent his armies into battle, had his people kill all of those that did not follow him. ( in the same books that the commandants were given)

We see that when they came to take Jesus in the Garden ( after spending several years with Christ) that at least some of the followers were armed ( they took a sword and cut off a ear of one of the servants who came to arrest Jesus)

We see Jesus turning over the money tables in the temple,
He did not forgive them and let them alone.

Don't confuse forgiving with protecting yourself and with doing what is right in God's eyes

[gromitt82]

Dear Jackester,

In the first place, let me try to clarify a couple of points.
I have never claimed to be the kind of person that “if someone comes up and punch my nose will break out into a song and thank God for it”, as you say.
On the contrary, I’m rather the kind of guy (if I can consider myself a guy at 85) that if someone pushes me, I try to push him back.
But this is exactly what I am pretending to say. You need to have the same spirit and strong faith as the martyrs had, to gladly accept death rather than renege your Faith.
I am not made of the same raw material as martyrs were made of. Or perhaps my faith is not strong enough to endure that much suffering in the name of God.
On the other hand, when I speak of enemies I’m not necessarily referring to those who want to physically hurt or damage us but to all those who endanger our normal way of life through greed, ambition or misdemeanour.
That is, when our politics lie to us, or the great multinational corporations do not care in the least –although they claim they do- if thousands of acres in the Brazilian rainforest are destroyed, to build up a huge paper mill or when they spend millions to bribe some corrupt African prime minister, to have free access to his uranium or oil, although his population is starving, these people are also our enemies or actually the enemies of mankind, even though, most of them attend very piously to the Sunday Mass!
And I cannot love them!
Now then, you speak of “taking God seriously”, and this is, in my opinion, where our problem lies. We usually do not take God seriously, i.e. we do not fully believe all the implications involved in not taking Him seriously. You say “we have to understand enough God’s purposes implied in why we should love our enemies”, which, I repeat, I do not love!
But we are not to understand anything about God’s purposes. When I was in the army, I was told I was not to question any order. I was not to think, just to obey!
God’s instructions are crystal clear! He sent his Son to redeem us. He died for us and He forgave his enemies. That is the example we should actually follow if we decided to accept God’s discipline and orders as we did accept the military ones.
However, there is a certain difference between both orders. With the military we know for sure we risk immediate punishment if we do not follow their orders.
And this punishment, whatever it is, will happen to us right here, where we are alive and kicking.
Whereas with God’s orders, which are just as clear cut as the military ones, we are told we risk some kind of punishment although, in the end, we might be forgiven, thanks to God’s infinite mercy.
Egad! Is not that taking a lot of chances? Do we have some kind of foolproof confirmation that this is going to be so? Has anybody, other than the same Jesus Christ, come back to tell us what we are to do, to be on the safe side?
We are just humans and as such, subject to all kind of temptations and able to find hundreds of apparently logical reasons to justify our behaviour...
But whom are we trying to fool! Certainly, not God!
At least, not the God which we claim we believe in!
You can produce considerations, no matter how many, such as the Petit family ,or thousands of other similar evidences of evil or injustices we constantly see in our world.
In mathematics 2 plus 2 will always be 4. No way to prove something else.
When God told us through His Son: “love each other as I have loved you”, He did not add any conditional stipulations such as “except if”, “but if” or “provided that”. He did not say “but 20 centuries from now, life will be so different, that this commandment will have to be interpreted with a grain of salt...”
2 + 2 = 4, twenty centuries ago, and twenty centuries from now!
As for Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, you are right: we do not know much about the Genesis, nor about the O.T. in general.
Actually, we know more or less the same as we know about ancient Sumerian or Egyptian cultures or about old History in general. We should never forget the kind of mentality and knowledge prevailing when that History was written at a given time as well as the many eventual modifications and/or versions it may have suffered throughout years.
Another problem we are facing –at least, I am- is that we cannot understand what the word God really means.
To start with, let us stop for a moment to remember that God is the sole and only responsible Creator of the Universe we know, and of whatever other Universes, if any, there may exist.
Now, we are more or less familiar with the size of our known Universe and/or the size of the stars that form it, and/or the billions of them we can count.
Do we really assimilate the idea of the kind of energy needed to create all this cosmic structure, its laws and its development? OK! There is the Big Bang, where so many scientists agree upon! But, then, Who was responsible for this Big Bang? Are we to believe it came out of nowhere, out of nothing?
Honestly, I would find this more difficult to believe than believing in an Almighty God who decided, some 14 billion years ago, to create the necessary conditions the Big Bang needed to happen.
Now, what kind of God, that already existed 14 billion years ago, could that be? Certainly, not something like Zeus seating in his Olympus home, or having something to do with humans, “in the image of God, He created male and female” (Gen. 1:26), where the implication is that, if not physically, we are spiritually like God...
Simply speaking, God is absolutely incomprehensible to us and if we should really accept this fact and that such a Power sent to our Earth someone, we Catholics consider like His Son, to redeem us from the original sin, then we better walk the line as He commanded!
Point is that we are only human, as I said, and as such subject to all kind of doubts and excuses.
Gromitt82

[gromitt82]

Fr. C huck,

As I have just said to our colleague Jackester, we can try to find all kind of philosophical or theological explanations or reasoning to justify our behavior. Reasons that will certainly sound 100% logical to our capacity to reason.
On the other hand, Christ words are also crystal clear and precise!
Do we have any guarantee that our reasoning will be accepted in the Beyond..? "
Do we really know how to trace a line between what is right or what is wrong? Is this line always placed in the same place when we are dealing with people we consider our friends or with people we consider our enemies?
Are we being fair enough when we judge who is right and who is wrong?
I'm afraid the answer is NO to all these questions...
Gromitt82