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To Do Good to Those who Hate Us

Christ Crucified is not embarrassed by our plight or disgusted by our failures when we find ourselves defenseless before those who despise us and what we believe as Christians. He is grieved by the numerous injustices that we suffer more than we can ever grieve for ourselves. He never allows those who despise us to have the final word. Just the opposite. He stands with us, unvanquished.  In standing with us through it all, He implicates those who hate our faith in His definitive victory of good over evil, giving us even greater reason for the hope we have inside.

There is an exquisite grace that the Lord yearns to grant, but He cannot as long as we close ourselves off to Him. He needs our trust for Him to accomplish His Will in us. He needs our vulnerability and our openness before the wonder of His presence. Yet, we cannot be open to wonder and we cannot find confidence in Him as long as we are more focused on ourselves than we are on Him.

When it comes to helping us see just how little we are really open to God, an enemy is like an angel from Heaven. It is true that such a person, especially when friend or family, knows what buttons to press. At the most inopportune time we find ourselves pushed to the brink. If you find yourself at just such a place, it is time to thank God. At brink of human existence, we open to God and God opens to us.

The brink is not a place of mere emotional insecurity but instead an intensely spiritual place of surrender. The harsh judgments to which the scorn or indifference of others incline us are only so many symptoms that our way of life remains out of harmony with the deeper truth written into the substance of our humanity.By faith, we do right to resist the impulse to retaliate and to submit these grievances to the Holy Spirit. Yet the more we love and try to serve those who hate us, the more we discover that deeper and more fundamental lack of confidence in God and His will for us. This interior state of affairs is known only through great suffering, but this knowledge provides the surest ground for the hope we have inside.

Whenever our enemy helps us repent of our distrust of God, the Risen One cuts new and unexpected facets of patience and gentleness in the soul.  It is a painful grace.  Cold stone is rendered into living flesh and the greatness of our Christian faith raises everything and everyone onto unfamiliar heights.
He Himself is the resounding Word that the Father subtly whispers into the depths of our broken existence, making all things new even as all our noble intentions and resolutions come tumbling down all around us. In such moments, He humbly waits for our invitation, and we know that He will not resist the humble contrite cry of love.

This solidarity of human suffering and divine love in such prayer converges on the Mystery of the Cross. When we follow in the footsteps of our crucified Master by such prayer, the scorn of an adversary or the betrayal by a friend can only lead us all the more to this supreme moment.  When we fix our gaze on the One who gazes on us with love, even as the urge to lash out swells, we find the freedom not to render evil for evil, but to do good to those who hate us.

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He Came to His Senses – The Beginning of Prayer

The parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15:12ff stands out for those struggling in the life of prayer.  As we read the story, we find ourselves putting ourselves in the place of the different characters, measuring our actions against theirs: the merciful father, the prodigal son, the elder son, even the servants.  I also love to think about the father’s house and how it serves as a fitting image for the ultimate end of the divine economy, the fundamental purpose of our creation and salvation: that joyful communion of love, of perfect unity with one another in the bosom of the Holy Trinity.

Jesus tells this parable on his way to Jerusalem from Galilee.  He too is going to His Father’s House, the Temple where he was presented as a child and where he was found at the threshold of his teenage years.  He knows the Father of Mercy.  In the mystery of such exceeding love, how could His heart not be broken over the plight of His sons and daughters?  Where there was no hope, the Father sent His Son to be hope.  Christ, like the prodigal son, lost everything He had – except not in disobedience but obedience, not on destitute living but rather out of love for the destitute.  Spiritual poverty, misery, suffering- this is the horizon of our humanity that God has chosen to share with us.

Like a servant, a suffering servant, accomplishing the Father’s will with signs and wonders, the Son liberates those He encounters along the way.  He wants to help them come to their senses so that He might free them from serving the pigsty in which they are trapped.   This redemption is won at great price.  Like the Merciful Father, the Image of the invisible God is misunderstood, rejected, threatened, betrayed and denied by those He most relies on.  It is by passing through this misery that the Word made flesh enters into the heart of humanity, the Father’s House where the Chosen People worshipped God in the shadow of history – where we too can begin to worship Him now in mystery.

When we listen to the parable of the prodigal son, it is important to remember that Christ Himself is telling us this story.  The Word of the Father journeys through our hearts just as He journeyed through the misery of Galilee and Judah.  Everything He says and does has inexhaustible meaning in relation to His destination, the Father’s house to which He leads us.

When He tells us the prodigal son came to senses, this means something for our life of prayer.  To hear the voice of the Father’s Word in our hearts compels us to deny our false judgments about life and to make a new judgment about the Father: this is to come to our senses.  It is a moment of humility, a moment of trust, and a moment of compunction.  It is the moment in which the Father finds us.  If, in our righteous indignation, we play the elder brother and refuse this moment, how will we enter the Father’s House?  Embracing this moment with gratitude and allowing oneself to be embraced by the Father: this is what it means to begin to pray.

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Self-Denial – Surest Pathway

Contrary to those who insist that spiritual maturity is about mastering a technique or the successful completion of some elaborate program, St. John of the Cross sees the road to union with God as an easy and simple journey if we embrace radical self-denial:

The road leading to God does not entail a multiplicity of considerations, methods, manners, and experiences — though this may be a requirement for beginners — but demands only the one thing necessary: true self-denial, exterior and interior, through the surrender of both to the passion of Christ and by annihilation in all things. Ascent to Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 7, Complete Works, translators Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1991)171. 

Self-denial is the practice of acting against the drive for comfort, security and satisfaction we seek in our relationships with people and in our relation to things.   As long as we worry about having influence over others or whether they esteem us, and as long as we only see anything else as a crutch with which to get through life, we are not vulnerable to the Lord and open to the wonders of His love at work in us and in the world.  This extends even to efforts to practice prayer merely as a program of mental hygiene.  The Lord did not die on the Cross so that we might find a little psychological relief from the stress of daily life. Thus, we turn our backs on these things, annihilate our disordered appetites, pick up our cross and follow in the steps of our Crucified Master.

Christ is our pattern.  We imitate Him out of devotion to Him.  He suffered the annihilation of all his earthly powers unto death out of love for the Father and for the sake of our salvation – because He loved us in the Father from all eternity.   Our love becomes eternal when we follow His example and allow His love for the Father to animate our lives and extend its hidden beauty into the world through us.

Some think these counsels regarding self-denial and annihilation mean that the spiritual life is suppose to be a joyless affair.   But really the more we renounce joys that are beneath our dignity, the more room we have for a deeper and more abiding joy.   There are some great joys that in fact give God glory when we share them.

If you have ever been captivated by the mountains in the early morning when they are suddenly crown in light or felt the reverberation of the surf crashing against the coastline —  you have probably felt drawn to silent adoration.   There is also a sweetness found in secretly bringing joy to others — those who have gone before us in the faith probably smile when we share this foretaste of our heavenly homeland.   We enjoy these wonderful works of God because, comfortable and pleasurable though they are in themselves, they raise us up out of self-pre-occupation to our true purpose, and in doing so they help us behold the splendor of the One in whose image we are made.

Such joys are not opposed to self-denial.  Instead, they foster it.  Somehow these joys give us the courage we need to embrace the beatitude of holy sorrow and open us  to the surest pathway.

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