So it does not get any easier, does it?
At least, that could be our first thought when we hear this passage from the Gospel we have heard today. We started reading last week from “Luke’s beatitudes”, and we learned how Jesus asked his disciples to accept to become poor and hungry, sad and rejected for the sake of the Kingdom, and today we continue with the same passage, the sermon on the plain, and now we see that Jesus asks those who follow him to love their enemies. Jesus asks his followers to “love [their]enemies, do good to those who hate [them] to bless those who curse [them] and to pray for those who abuse [them]“. It is of course this famous passage about “turning the other cheek“, but no matter how well we know it, indeed it does not get any easier each time we read it. How are we to love people who hate us, or despise us, or hurt us? Jesus says: If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? But well, I think we all know from experience that it’s already hard to love those who love us, to really “love” those we “love”. Actually, we all fail at loving the ones we love, don’t we? We struggle to keep our promises, to make time for them, to listen and show up when they need us, we get irritated by little things and sometimes we get into big fights and in the end we cannot even remember what started them. It’s hard to love those whom we love, so how can we love even those who don’t love us, how can we keep doing good, bless and pray no matter the offense and the hurt?
I was with a group of students recently and we read one of Jesus’s parables about forgiveness, the story of a man whose Master forgives his big debt, and then the same man is unable to forgive the small debt another servant owes him, and the Master learns about that and gets mad at the man for his lack of mercy and throws him into jail. And one person reacted quite strongly saying: Okay…so, is it Jesus saying that if you’re not perfect, you’ll go to hell? But when we read more closely we realized, it’s no about being perfect, it’s about forgiving, forgiving as we have been forgiven, forgiving because we have been forgiven. And maybe we have in mind that forgiving is indeed this big godly thing, that is so hard to do, like when Jesus forgave his enemies on the cross, and we’re not Jesus right, but then I came across this quotation that changed all my understanding about that and I am going to read it to you. It’s from Henri Nouwen and here what he says:
“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly, and so we need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. Forgiveness is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”
And you know, the first time I read this quotation, I thought I read it wrong, or that there was a typo. Forgiveness is for those who love poorly? I assume forgiveness was for those who loved perfectly, those who loved like only Jesus could love, the heroes of forgiveness like the Amish forgiving the school shooter or the monks in the Atlas who were assassinated by the extremists. Yet the explanation of Nouwen makes perfect sense if you think about it: Forgiveness is just what we do and what we have to keep doing if we want to live this life, and we do forgiveness because we are not expert at loving, we are neither gods nor angels, we are those who keep failing at loving, and so we have to become expert at mending, reshaping, starting all over again and keep going. If we’re honest for a minute, who among us would still have a spouse, still see their children, still have friends, even still be part of a church, if we hadn’t in the process learned to forgive each other when we hurt each other whether intentionally or not, forgive each other when we disappoint each other, when we misunderstand each other, when we aren’t for each other everything we would expect the other one to be? As so Jesus seems to ask us something very hard, but we can also hear it this way which makes it much easier: You don’t really need to know how to love, you just need to learn how to forgive. And I don’t know what you think, but I find it quite reassuring.And it looks like we don’t even have to trouble ourselves about what we should forgive or whom we should forgive and how we should forgive, because we just have to forgive. As we reflected about that with the students, somebody said that we live in a world where there is very little forgiveness, and I thought it was really sad for people that young to realize that. When you’re twenty and there is so many choices to be made, and you know so little about things, and you feel so strongly about everything, of course you are going to make mistakes and to get it wrong and to hurt people in the process, and then how are you to keep going if you don’t expect anybody to forgive you?
So how can we become more forgiving? I think there are three points we can gather from our Gospel today
1 – Some say you need to start forgiving yourself to become more forgiving. Well, it can be tricky as we see some people all too ready to forgive themselves, to make excuses for their behavior or just feel entitled to do things that hurt others people. But there is also some truth in this saying that we need to forgive ourselves when it means we have to accept that we are not perfect, that we also can be hurtful or just wrong. As Jesus asks people to be more forgiving, even and especially towards their enemies and those who hurt them, he reminds the people that they themselves have to be forgiven. When we forgive others, it does not mean we say that what they did to us doesn’t matter, was not that bad after all, it’s not about compromising with the truth. Jesus was very clear about the sins of the people, he didn’t try to tell them they were right or good after all, but that’s actually why forgiveness is necessary. We’re not perfect but forgiveness is always a possibility. We forgive others and we ask for forgiveness too.
2 – As we acknowledge that we love poorly, that we don’t know how to love, we also acknowledge that God still loves us. We ourselves have to receive forgiveness from others but mainly we need to receive forgiveness from God. Jesus shows us that we can forgive and love not out of our own heart, but out of the abundance of God’s love and God’s mercy. That’s also why we pray for those who hurt us, so we can see them the way God sees them, so we can wish for them good things. I had to smile when I heard a priest say: We pray for our families and friends, but I don’t think in our churches we put a lot of our enemies on our prayer lists. Well certainly we don’t need a rubric: For those we don’t love, but it certainly could help if we came every week with someone on our heart with whom we have difficult relationships, and also have specific intentions for those who have hurt us or wronged us, and pray for them as we do for people we care about. Prayer is not a hard thing Jesus asks us to do for our enemies, rather blessing our enemies, praying for our enemies is also meant to help us deal with them.
3 – Last thing that could help us to become more forgiving is to free ourselves from fear. Most of the time, we don’t want to forgive because we are afraid we are going to be hurt again if we keep on loving hurtful people who won’t give us what we need. Well, concretely we sometimes need to keep ourselves safe and there is nothing unloving about that. Emotionally also, we know that love makes us vulnerable, but in Jesus’s teaching there is a sense that we shouldn’t necessarily have expectations as we do so often in our relationships, especially when we anticipate reciprocity, giving only to those who give us. Actually one could say that it is because of our expectations that we often get hurt. Jesus teaches again that from loving “poorly”, unable as we are to love, we need to love “like poor people”, in the sense of “making ourselves poor”, not trying to gain something out of our relationships, because our true reward is with God. Having a reward with God, it’s of course not about getting things, rather it is about becoming able to love as God loves, for the only sake of loving, to do good for the sake of doing good. And so that’s the irony, and also of course the wonder of it, is that when we accept that we don’t love perfectly and therefore forgive, that’s when we actually become perfect in love. Forgiveness is altogether the most humble and the most sublime kind of love, it is for sinners and heroes, for God and for all the people, it’s the only way for all of us, and it may not get any easier but it’s also not more difficult than that.