Today’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 5:43-48) concludes with these encouraging words of Jesus, “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”(Matthew 5:48) from the Sermon on the Mount . There is a Lucan parallel of Jesus’ words: Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:36) from the Sermon on the Plain. Both of these juxtaposable phrases of Jesus are in the context of his teaching on loving not just our neighbors but also our enemies. Jesus wants us to be like the Father in heaven in terms of love and its derivative, mercy. And love and mercy are inseparable. Without love, no mercy. No mercy, which comes from love, no justice.
In yesterday’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 5:20-26),
Jesus challenges us to raise the level of our righteousness above that of the
Scribes and the Pharisees to be ushered in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew
5:20). In biblical Greek, “righteousness”( δικαιοσύνη
/dikaiosune ) is derived from δίκη/dike, which means “justice”. Thus, righteousness is a sense of
justice, and it is driven by love to incorporate mercy.
In today’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 5:43-48), Jesus
calls us to be perfect, as our Father is in heaven, is so, by loving even our
enemies, because it is also to be merciful as the Father is so, in juxtaposition to Luke 6:27-36. And, being perfect as the Father is so means
being perfect in love, from which mercy is derived, by loving even those who we
tend to hate. And it goes along with raising our righteousness above and beyond
that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, whose interpretation, teaching, and
observance of the Law is superficial and, therefore, hypocritical.
For us to be perfect, Jesus picks a well-known
commandment (mizvah) on loving
neighbor, Leviticus 19:18, and said, “You
have heard that it was said, ‘ You shall love your neighbor ‘” (Matthew
5:43a). And Jesus added, “and hate your
enemy”(Matthew 5:43b), perhaps reflecting Psalm 139:21-22 (cf. 1 QS 9:21)
assuming that people interpret these verses of Davidic Psalm to justify their
hatred of enemies. When David penned these two verses of Psalm 139, he might
have thought of an ancient treaty of loyalty between a king and his servant,
acknowledging, “With my friend you shall be friend, and with my enemy, you
shall be enemy”. In this Psalm, David
expresses his loyalty to God by hating people whom God hates. And, people could
have used these verses to think that it is a righteous thing to love those whom
they consider as their neighbors or friends while they hate those whom they
considered as enemies. So, this is where Jesus’ teaching on the Leviticus 19:18
kicks in to assert that loving our neighbors does not mean hating our enemies
but this commandment to love our neighbors also means to love even our enemies
– those whom we tend to hate. Dualism is
not in Jesus’ thinking and teaching. To Jesus, loving certain people but hating
others is not a genuine way of loving – authentic way of observing Leviticus
19:18.
In Jesus thinking and teaching, loving neighbors, as in Leviticus 19:18, means to love all, those whom we like and those who we may not like and those whom we hate - all people, regardless of our own preference, just as the sun, which God created, shines indiscriminately upon both those whom we love and those whom we hate out of our own imperfect hearts, as reflected in Matthew 5:45.
The sun does not pick and choose to whom it shines
on and to whom it does not. So, our observance of Leviticus 19:10 to love our
neighbors shall be likewise. It is our ego-centric imperfect hearts that pick
and choose who we are to love and who we are to hate, dividing us and them.
Now, it does not mean that we have to agree or
condone the evil that our enemies practice.
We must fight the evil and win this battle against evil. By loving our
enemies, we can help them overcome evil and eventually become our friends
through their metanoia. There, we can establish peace with newly
gained friends, former enemies, by our loving – by being agents of God’s
perfect love and mercy. Then, together
we form stronger and greater army to fight evil. And this is God’s test on our love, through
Jesus’ authentic teaching on the commandment of love from the Law in the Old
Testament.
Not only through today’s Gospel Reading (Matthew
5:43-48) but also through yesterday’s (Matthew 5:20-26), Jesus shows us how
deep his authentic teaching of the Old Testament Law, in which there are 613 commandments,
is, in contrast to superficial and legalistic teaching of the hypocrites, such
as the Scribes and the Pharisees. In his authentic teaching of the Law, and it
is how he fulfills the Law, Jesus challenges us to bring the spirit of the Law
to the depth of our hearts, where we have all the antecedents of our behaviors,
namely emotions that can be manifested in our behaviors. This way, Jesus
teaches us that observing the Law is not just about making our outer behaviors
in compliance but our hearts and mindsets are in compliance not just the
letters but the spirit of the Law. For this reason, in today’s First Reading
(Deuteronomy 26:16-19), Moses said, “Be
careful, then, t observe them (the commandments in the Law) with your whole
hearts and with your whole being”(Deuteronomy 26:16). Therefore, we do not
observe the Law superficially by simply making our behaviors in compliance
though negating our hearts, harboring all these antagonizing emotions in our
hearts. This statement of Moses reflects
why Jesus teaches the Law to fulfill it. And Moses further said that this is a
covenant (mutual agreement) between God and us – to observe His Law without
inconsistency between our behaviors and our hearts (motives) (Deuteronomy
26:17-18). And this is exactly how Jesus wants us to observe the Law as he
fulfills it in his Sermon on the Mount.
Have you noticed that we have been reading quite a
lot from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29) during Lent? The Sermon on the Mount is like the New Torah (Law) to Christians. And, Lent is a season to reflect on the Sermon and treat it like "GPS" or "road map" for our Lenten journey.
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 on Ash Wednesday: How we commit
ourselves to practicing the Lenten virtues of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving
Matthew 6:7-15 on Tuesday of the First Week of Lent:
Prayer and forgiveness
Matthew 7:7-12 on Thursday of the First Week of Lent:
Prayer with persistence and caring for one another according to the law and the
prophets
Matthew 5:20-26 on Friday of the First Week of Lent:
Our righteousness and the 5th Commandment (not to kill)
Matthew 5:43-48 on Saturday of the First Week of
Lent: Our perfection and the commandment to love our neighbors
Matthew 5:17-19 on Wednesday of the Third Week of
Lent: Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law
Basically, the Sermon on the Mount is the manual for
Christian life, according to Jesus. In
Matthew 5:17-48, Jesus shows what he meant by having come to fulfill the Law
and prophecies (Matthew 5:17) by contrasting Pharisaic teaching of the Law to
his teaching with “It was said….but I
tell you…” format (vv. 21-22, 27-28,
31-32. 33-34, 38-39, 43-44). In these comparisons, Jesus shows how superficial
Pharisee’s teaching is as it is on the letters of the Law but how authentic and
deep his teaching is as it reflects the spirit of the Law. And this is to observe the Law wholeheartedly
and without a gap between our behaviors and motive in our heart, as Moses said
in Deuteronomy 26:16.
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