Who loves knows and forgives

Learning the logic of Love

VII Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year C - February 23rd 2025

 

Roman Rite:

1 Sam 26.2.7-9.12-13.22-23; 1Cor 15,45-49; Lk 6, 27-38

 

Ambrosian Rite

Dn 9.15-19; Ps 106; 1Tim 1,12-17; Mk 2: 13-17

Penultimate Sunday after the Epiphany called "of the divine clemency"

 

  

1) The happiness of loving the enemy.

 The demands of love, the new commandment that Jesus brought into the world, "love one another as I have loved you ..." (Jn 19:12), are the plot of the passage from today's Gospel that is the crowning of the beatitudes on which we meditated last Sunday. Today Christ tells us: "To you, who hear, I say: love ...". The whole theme of the speech of the Redeemer is articulated on the underlying theme of love. It is a speech that manifests the logic of Christ that is not always easy to make ours in the concrete situations of life.

            "Love." Jesus says, but the love of which he speaks does not have the boundaries of the family, nor of the circle of friends or of pleasant people. The love of which the Lord speaks has the flavor of a challenge: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you", a love, which is not only a sentiment, but is realized in the concreteness of gestures: "Do good to those who hate you .... pray for those who mistreat you ... to those who hit you on the cheek, offer the other as well, …give to anyone who asks .... and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back". Therefore, a love without limits but not an absurdity, because this way of loving is the way of loving of God, made visible in his Son Jesus. In fact, if we contemplate the passion of Christ, we see how He sees this passion in which Christ puts into practice the words he is telling us today: words of offer, of love and forgiveness for the world that is condemning him to death. Like Jesus we pray for the executioners, we offer our cheek, we open the door of forgiveness as He opened the door of paradise to a thief.

Jesus is always the one who gives and gives himself. Every Christian, guided by the golden rule "Do to others as you would have them do to you", is called to be like him.

Let us keep in mind that the love for the enemy is the vertex of the love for the neighbor. In fact, the love for the enemy highlights - as it does not happen in any other form of love - the two profound characteristics of every authentic evangelical love. First of all, the tension towards universality: in the love for the enemy the figure of the "neighbor" expands to the point of enclosing even the "farthest"; and, who is farther than our enemy? And the note of gratuity, which is the soul of all true love.

            We must keep in mind that the figure of the enemy of which Luke speaks, is, we can say, a daily and a normal one: it is not about a persecutor, but simply about the one who speaks ill of us, hates and mistreats us. The concrete examples are numerous and go beyond the narrow scope of the enemy: it speaks not only of those who hates, strikes, steals, but also of those who request a loan without having the opportunity to give it back. Luke is particularly interested in emphasizing the gratuitousness of love.

            The motivations that justify love for the enemy are two: to distinguish oneself from sinners and to be children of the Most High. It is about behaving like one's own God, "benevolent towards the ungrateful and the bad". The adjective "benevolent" in Greek "χρηστός (chrestòs)" says the careful, welcoming, and mild love that does not weigh what it gives. "Ungrateful" in Greek ἀχαρίστos (acharìstos) emphasizes once more the absence of any claim of reciprocity. We do not love the one who is far away to make him come near. We love him because we want to prolong the benevolence of God on him. Even if it seems paradoxical to us, let us educate us in the ability of loving the other without his merit, recalling to the mind that God has loved us from eternity, even before we were born. God has loved us with an eternal love and continues to love us with a faithful love not for our merit, but for his most pure and disinterested love. He did not need us, but he created us because of his pure love to make us as happy as He is.

 

2) Learning the logic of God.

The logic of Christ totally disrupts our logic. The command of love for the enemies and of forgiveness is the most scandalous, incomprehensible and illogical one for the disciples of Jesus of two thousand years ago as for us today. We are asked to act not according to our instinct and our humanity, but according to God and like God. "Like God" means: to be merciful. The one who takes revenge wants a victory for himself. The one who forgives gives the possibility to the other to win, that is, to open oneself to the life of God.

            The logic of God is always "different” from ours, as God himself reveals through the prophet Isaiah: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, your ways are not my ways" (Is 55). For this reason, following the Lord always requires a profound conversion, a change in the way of thinking and living, it requires opening the heart to listening in order to let ourselves be illuminated and transformed inwardly. A key point in which God and man differ is pride: in God there is no pride, because He is total fullness and He is all about loving and giving life; in us, pride is intimately rooted and requires constant vigilance and purification. We, who are small, aspire to appear great, to be the first, while God does not fear to lower himself and to be the last. The Virgin Mary is perfectly "attuned" to God: let us invoke her with trust and imitate her with generosity, following Jesus faithfully with her on the path of love and humility.

The logic of God is not inhuman, rather it makes our humanity flourish. Therefore, we must not be afraid to assume the logic of God, even if it is the logic of the Cross, which is not, first of all, that of pain and death, but that of love and of the gift of self that brings life "(Pope Francis).

The logic of God is different from ours. His omnipotence is also different: it is not expressed as an automatic or arbitrary force, but is marked by a loving and paternal freedom. In reality, God, creating free creatures and giving freedom, has renounced to a part of his power, leaving the power of our freedom. If we assume the logic of God, we will use our power not with violence nor with destruction, but with love, in mercy, and in forgiveness. This way of acting is only apparently weak, because in reality "only the one who is really powerful can bear evil and show compassion; only the one who is truly powerful can fully exercise the power of love. And God, to whom all things belong because everything has been done by Him, reveals his strength by loving everything and everyone, in a patient waiting for the conversion of us men, whom He wishes to have as children "(Benedict XV).

"The logic of God is sharing and mercy. It does not reason according to prizes or punishments, but on the basis of welcoming all those who request mercy and forgiveness so that all return to being brothers and sisters" (Pope Francis).

If we learn the logic of God, we also understand virginity, which is an imitation of Christ, Logos of God. It is the highest form of identification with the humanity of the Redeemer. Jesus lived a complete loving dependence from the Father. The Son and the Father are one. The Son does what the Father tells him, and what pleases the Father (see Jn 8: 28-29, 10, 30, 14, 31). Virginity is above all this: living entirely for God, participating in his will, devoting all the energies to his kingdom in the world.

An example of a life lived in the logic of virginity is that of the consecrated virgins. In a time like ours, so full of eroticism and sexual permissiveness, it might be incomprehensible to reflect on consecrated virginity. Today, in regard to virginity perhaps, more than contestation, there is too much confusion, accompanied by little faith and lack of courage to propose the beauty and fruitfulness of this choice of Christian life. Consecrated virginity is a gift, a charism, an event of grace for those who, in view of the Kingdom, establish a personal and exclusive relationship with Christ, radically deciding not to possess anything, not even their own body. Consecrated virginity, lived in the local Church, feeds on falling in love. There is no other logical or rational explanation.

The only joy of the virgin is and will be Christ. Therefore, the consecrated virgins are called to live this vocation by witnessing that “Christian virginity thus exists in the world as a clear sign of the future Kingdom because its presence exposes the relativity of material goods and the transitory nature of the world itself. In this sense, like the celibacy of the prophet Jeremiah, it foretells the imminent end. But at the same time, because of the spousal bond with Christ, it also proclaims the beginning of the life of the world to come, the new world according to the Spirit. This sign, as occurs in the biblical vision, is not a simply conventional reference or the pale image of a distant reality, but the reality itself in its nascent expression. In the sign is contained, even if still hidden, the future reality.

Consecrated virginity is therefore placed in a spousal framework, which is not theogamic (meaning: of marriage with the divinity), but theologal, that is, baptismal, because it concerns the spousal love of Christ for the Church (cf. Eph 5:25-26). It concerns a supernatural salvific reality, not just a human one, that cannot be explained with the logic of reason but with faith, because, as the scriptures call to mind, Your husband is your creator (Is 54:5). This is one of the great works of the new order inaugurated with Christ’s Passover and the outpouring of the Spirit, an experience difficult for carnal humanity to understand and comprehensible only by those who let themselves be taught by the Spirit of God (1 Cor 2, 12-13).” (Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Instruction on the Ordo Virginum, Ecclesiae Sponsae Imago, No. 17).