Today we’re challenged by Christ to “love our enemies.” But before we can begin to understand the “how” of Christ’s command, we have to understand what He means by love. There’s a lot of confusion today about the meaning of love. While everyone recognizes that love is good, what often passes for love is not what we as Orthodox (right-believing) Christians would define as such. We learn true love from God, the Author of love, or not at all. The word used in the Greek New Testament to describe His love is ‘agape.’ It’s always a selfless kind of love, which thinks of the needs of others, and which is manifest in humility, service to others, and self-emptying—kenosis in the Greek—the same self-emptying that Christ God demonstrates to us in His Incarnation and in His willingness to give His life to defeat sin and death on our behalf. It’s this love that He, in turn, calls us to exercise if we are to live in communion with Him, saying, “He who would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me” (Mt. 16:24).
Love in our culture is often actually lust (a twisted eros), driven by the passions, as well as ego, pride. Love is often seen manifesting itself as something focused on wants and rights, on a self-focused understanding of fulfillment, as opposed to the kind of agape love I just described.
And so if that’s how we understand love, no wonder there’s confusion; if it’s only a emotional feeling, an obligatory attachment, or the temporary high of lust, then no wonder that so many marriages end in divorce and many young people today ask, “why bother with marriage,” even as others try to change what marriage is.
Without agape love, the very idea of loving one’s enemies or being generous in our lending seem almost ‘quaint’. We know how to love those who love us, but love those who dislike or hate us, or oppose us, or make our lives difficult? Rather than putting these commands of Christ away, relegating them to a by-gone era of Church history, of some ‘quaint’ teaching of Christ, we have an opportunity here to wrestle with their application in our own lives, to bring this aspect of the Kingdom of God to truly bear on our lives.
One of our biggest impediments to loving as God loves, as God calls us, in turn, to love, is pride. Indeed, pride is so wrapped up in our modern understanding of love, that we don’t even see how it can be separated. It’s pride that causes us to be self-focused and indifferent to the need of others; it’s pride that makes us easily offended; it’s pride that convinces us in our over-sensitivity to act as if Orthodox Christianity is only ‘my thing’ and not what Christ God calls the world to in His love for mankind and that keeps us from sharing our faith more. It’s pride that keeps us from using our gifts and talents to God’s glory; it’s pride that keeps us from seeing the good in others. It’s pride that makes us dependent on ourselves rather than on God and causes us to neglect the divine services and Sacraments God gives us to grow in His love and grace.
St. John Cassian says of the prideful man, “He is not to be appeased when one admonishes him; he is weak in curtailing his own wishes, very stubborn when asked to yield to those of others… he is always more ready to trust to his own judgment than to that of the elders.” The expectation these days is that if you ‘love’ someone you’ll let them do whatever they want to and without God, there’s no objective understanding of what is harmful to them or to us.
Pride is a great challenge to overcome. And so, when we discover a foothold of pride in us, either through our own deducing or through the Holy Spirit working in our hearts through confession, we have an opportunity to confess it and begin praying against it, to become more conscious of its terrible work inside us, and then, step by step, we can allow God to chip away at it and bring us the healing that will free us to truly love as God loves, in a self-emptying way, as we serve and give, unashamed of being an Orthodox Christian.
As we pray against pride, we pray for humility, assured that God hears such prayers and will work through them for our good as we allow Him to. As we grow in humility, we grow in love and service to others, not just those whom we love, but yes, even for those who make our lives difficult, even for our enemies. As we grow in humility, we grow in our communion with God since by grace we come to share more and more of this attribute of His divine nature.
Christ, in admonishing us to “love our enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return,” promises us great spiritual reward if we let our hearts put this kind of active agape love into practice, saying that we will be His sons and daughters, co-heirs with Christ and fellow victors through Christ over sin and death.
Christ asks us, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them?” Many Orthodox have it so much harder than us: We think of our Syrian and Iraqi brothers and sisters during this time of persecution. Many of them face being literally wiped out by Muslim jihadists. I ran into a Syrian Orthodox man once, who had this to say: “You know, Father, we Christians cannot take revenge; we cannot fight like the Muslims do. We are called to love our enemies, to live at peace, to love.”
Humility exercised through love in this way is powerful, it is courageous, it is a true witness of the truth of Christ in a world of enmity, hatred, and pride. It’s a manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst. Exercising agape love in our own lives is a uniquely Christian practice that comes by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us and through us. With God working through us in our striving to model humility in love in our own lives, those around us will be touched, encouraged in the life in Christ as well.
We’re warned that in the end times because of lawlessness, “love will grow cold” (Matt. 24:12), that we, those in the Body of Christ, must persevere to the end. We do not know the time or the day when Christ will return, but we live now with eternity before our eyes, in the fear and love of the Lord, lest we remove ourselves from life with Him
We can’t afford to put off the hard work that is demanded of us if we are to overcome our our egos, our pridefulness, our false understandings of love, and learn to love God and others with humility—and yes, even to the point of loving those around us even when they don’t love us back the way we think they should. On our own, this is impossible; with God’s help and our continued growth in His divine grace, it’s not only possible, but it’s inevitable—the fruit of our life in Christ God and, through Him, with one another, and the world around us.
It’s not our circumstances, but our attitudes, our open hearts and minds toward God and the life that is only in Him, that makes the difference between our experiencing the blessings of life with God now and in the future, or living for ourselves and missing out on all that God in His goodness and love for us has promised those who put their trust in Him.
And so, we daily struggle against the passions, our pride, praying to love as Christ loves. We continue daily to strive to submit ourselves to His way, not giving preference to our own ideas. We courageously speak the truth in love to our culture, unashamed of being an Orthodox Christian. We avail ourselves of the deifying worship of Christ’s Church and the Sacraments—and make time for them. We struggle with our focus on Christ so that we may grow in what it is to be His beloved sons and daughters and experience more of His love in our lives. This is the love the world needs, agape—the love God wishes to give us in abundance so we can, in turn, give it to others and love—yes—even our enemies.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 5 October 2014
Epistle: II Cor. 6:16-17:1
Gospel: Luke 6:31-36
