But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.
Luke 6:35
Love your enemies: quite the paradox. Surely, if you love someone, he ceases to be your enemy - from your perspective, even if not from his.
This is where we must begin with Our Lord’s difficult command. There may be many people who want to be my enemies, but I will not let them. To make a conscious decision not to have enemies is a preliminary to loving those who declare war on us.
Love today is variously construed. As license to pursue one’s sexual desires, as a chemical reaction in the brain, as an expression of unqualified approval, as a fast food advertising slogan. Essentially, as an irresistible emotion, impervious to reason and control, and to which submission is the only proper course, whatever its cost to oneself or others.
Our Lord meant none of these things by love. One cannot be commanded to feel a certain way. Nor does He counsel slavery to our desires, but freedom from them. However much one might weep and swoon at the Passion of Christ with the more affective mystics of our tradition, Christian love cannot be reduced to passive emotionalism or passing feelings.
Nor, though, is love an exercise of cold rationality. Kant thought that the function of religion was to help us reason out our moral duties, as mechanical and predictable as the movement of the stars and planets. The data of revelation served only to furnish universal laws, from which moderns would later extract their “Christian values” (for which I have very little time). Love is thereby tamed, reduced to obedience to rationally demonstrable maxims, to the extent that we hardly need God at all. Such self-salvation by moral actions, with its echoes of my fellow Briton Pelagius, is not what Our Lord teaches or shows.
Love is indeed a decision, rationally made. But it is a decision made in response. In response to what, Our Lord makes clear, in both His teaching and His life: we love in response to the love of God, or more properly, in response to Him who is love.
God’s love comes first. It has to. It is only because God loves that we exist. It is only because God loves that we are saved. This is what we in the trade, following St Augustine, call “prevenient grace.” God’s grace comes before, “prevents,” as the Prayer Book rather literally translates the Latin, and we are called to live our whole lives in reply.
This call and response is not a one-off, like a cold-calling telesalesman offering a limited time bargain. It is a dialogue, which continues. Though salvation is sometimes marketed as just such a once-in-a-lifetime offer – sign here for saving now! – the covenant God offers us is far more like a marriage than a business deal. And like any wise marriage, it is an affair not only of head or of heart, but of the meeting of both: an affective and rational synthesis.
The first torrent of that loving feeling, the instinct to beauty, the self-loss in another’s eyes or dance or smile, that is the beginning. But it is tested and tempered with reason. By reason, the proposal is made and accepted, by reasoned choice the vows are made. Reason at play between the couple, the reason so needed for sensitivity and judgment, for communication and communion, for sorrow and forgiveness, makes their love last longer than a marriage based on passion alone.
So is our relationship with God. Late may we love Him, late know His beauty, but He has loved us always and is kind to us, however unthankful and evil we are. His proposal to us always stands, is never withdrawn. We must choose to accept it, with head and heart, and that acceptance happens at Holy Baptism, in which we like man and wife are made one body with Christ. But baptism is the beginning. In baptism we are saved, as in marriage the couple is wed. That much is final. But the growth in love and union continues well beyond the wedding day.
Marriage worked at seriously will yield an increase in love and all virtues, but if one weds in order to “be a good person” or as a moral imperative, then one is marrying for the wrong reasons: not bad in themselves, but certainly not enough. Likewise, our union with God must be worked at – “work out your own salvation,” says St Paul, no less – but, as Christ teaches, hoping for nothing in return.
I hope that these thoughts are enough to warn us off reading Luke’s depiction of Jesus as a “moral teacher.” When He says “the reward shall be great,” He is not teaching morality as some point system for earning your way into heaven like a supermarket loyalty card. Rather, He describes cause and effect. Make the decision to love God, neighbour and enemy even as God loves you, and this is what will happen. This is how God has made things work. Love like this, and you shall become children of the Highest, like the Son of God Himself. Which is another way of saying with St Irenaeus and St Athanasius that “God became man that man might become God.” Love is not a moral principle, but an ascetic practice of union with Christ our God, whereby in the words of St Peter, we are made “partakers of the divine nature.”
So, as Holy Lent approaches, where might one practically begin?
First, God’s call must be heard to be answered. We hear the call primarily in Scripture; our response is trained by prayer, and there are no better prayers than those the Lord has given us in the Our Father and the Psalms. Hence the Daily Office of Mattins and Evensong, even if shortened to just to the daily psalmody, is the basic commitment of time to conversation with God. Comparable to the routine morning and evening time spent by wife and husband around their daily work, if you lose this, the relationship can grow cold. You cannot love someone without making time to hear her. Begin with a commitment to morning and evening prayer.
For the unbaptised, the immediate next step is baptism. God is kneeling before you with the ring in His hand, waiting for you to say “yes.” Only then can the commitment needed for growth in love really begin.
For the baptised comes next the sacrament of greater intimacy, in which one is unified with the beloved in the flesh. One must make time for Holy Communion, that Christ may dwell in you and you in Him.
Thirdly, as one might have one’s spouse’s photograph on the work desk or in the wallet and take it out from time to time, or send the odd text message of appreciation, so one needs to recollect God often and in the everyday. Better short prayers and often than long and rare. The Jesus Prayer is ideal.
Love God surely and constantly, and love of neighbour will follow as water from an overflowing fountain. Put God before yourself, and you will put others before yourself, hoping for nothing but gaining all. You will be freed to refuse offers of enmity.
Such was the freedom Our Lord not only taught in words, but showed from the hopelessness of the Cross. We will not go far wrong if we keep hearts and minds pinned there, and learn His kindness.