The Sixth Sunday After Trinity

“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

 I recently saw somewhere in public a kid – somewhere around that age when you can sulk and throw a tantrum over things outside of everyone’s control, including your own – having a bit of a meltdown over something they wanted but couldn’t have, or something the parents couldn’t logistically provide.

It brought me back to that feeling and my distant memories of what it was like when I did that as a child, as we all did: not getting what you want, no matter how unreasonable, unable or unwilling to understand why you can’t have it/do it, and then being overcome by your sulkiness and letting it spoil what would otherwise be a great time at the carnival, or the arcade, or the beach, or whatever – all because you can’t get past this thing.

I suppose it’s about emotional regulation in children, it’s not just that they’re being frustratingly stubborn, but they can’t control their feelings as well as an adult or fully grasp why something might not be possible. All you can fixate on is what you wanted and didn’t get, and so even though better options are presented – a carnival ride, an ice cream, etc – all you can do is cross your arms, pout, and make yourself miserable.           

But then, we’re really not all that different now, are we? Our sulkiness and our poutiness, our tantrumy behaviour over not getting what we want just takes a different, maybe more adult form, or we turn it against ourselves, or against others and make their lives acutely miserable.

I think about what it takes to love a child in those moments, or to be loved as a child, and all the other moments: the screaming tantrums, the midnight sick-in-bed cleanup, the teenage years, and all that goes along with those things. No parent, I imagine, will confess to it being an easy love, or a love without cost but yet despite the challenges, despite what can be monumentally bigger challenges in the lives of parents caring for their children, no parent will tell you it’s not worth it, that they’d change anything or turn back the clock.

In fact there’s even a sense that when it comes to relationships, be they between parents and children, siblings, the wider family, spouses, there’s something about a love that has been tested by difficulty and struggle that is not just more resilient, but maybe even deeper. To love someone in the true sense of the word, in the midst of a storm is a very different thing than to love them in fair weather; and it’s in those moments, those struggles, maybe even through those moments or because of those moments – and not in spite of them – that love seems to find its fullest expression or can be encountered in a much more profound way.

Just to pull another example out of the air, think about the love that is put on display in Holy Week and how that particular expression of supreme love, through Jesus and through his passion – the suffering – shapes the disciples’ response, or even shapes our response. Would it – or could it – have been the same if Christ had come to die a peaceful death – what if there were no executioners to forgive, no Pharisees, Chief Priests, or Pontius Pilates? Would that love have been as convincing?

Today in the Gospel Jesus commands us to something which I have no doubt we all of us view as impossible – and so we should, because so it is. But nevertheless, it’s not a joke, nor a suggestion, nor an ideal of how things should be – it is a command, a completely unconditional commandment. An impossible commandment, but God does not command us to do what cannot happen, otherwise we are stuck spinning our wheels and God would have contradicted himself.   

It’s good for us, firstly, to make sure there’s no illusions about the strength of our ability to love or be loved. When we think about loving our enemies, when we think about God loving His enemies, we think of those who drove the nails, who swung the flail, who platted the crown of thorns, who thrusted the lance, who betrayed their friend – we never think about ourselves. We never stop and marvel that in fact it isn’t they who are the enemies of God whom God loves, but it is we who are the enemies of God whom God loves – enemies at least in the sense of all of those ways big and small that we crucify Him in our hearts every day, or crucify those whom he loves (our neighbous) in our hearts every day by our trespasses.

We are commanded to love our enemies as enemies who are being loved.

We, to use my first image, are not the parents of the child who is laying in their own sick in bed at 4am, trying to love them despite the circumstances – we are the child lying in our own sick, helpless and crying for our Parent at 4am, longing to be loved. And so we are.

This is to say that the commandment to love our enemies (as we have been loved as enemies) is impossible in every sense of the word…for us, but our lives are not properly our own. St. Paul, writing to the Church in Rome in our Epistle today, reminds us that by virtue of our baptisms we are baptized into Christ’s death. What Paul is saying is that in Baptism we are united, joined to-, in a spiritual sense, the life and death of Jesus, grafted onto his body (the church), and our baptism was our death to our old selves and we arose anew alive in Him, so that just as He rose to new life, wecan rise to new life. Without being grafted into him, part of him, there is no way for us to rise from death to new life. Death remains death.

It is because of this relationship with Christ, by being a part of him, that we become able to forgive our enemies, as he was able to forgive his, it is by his going to die on the cross for his enemies, and our being one with him, that the same love which was able to tolerate that, to overcome death and hatred, can be the love that guides us in our own loving.

But this doesn’t mean that what stands between us and our enemies is going to fade away, or that we’re going to forget the ways that our enemies have hurt us so deeply, or that they will forget the ways that we have hurt them, no; the parent’s love for the child doesn’t mean that they enjoy cleaning up sick, dealing with diapers, tantrumy toddlers or moody teenagers, but just as those moments have a forming effect on how much a parent loves a child, so too through Christ can those things we detest about our enemies be the proving ground for our love.

And what it means to love our enemies in a practical and daily way is not to force ourselves to smile as we suffer through being in their presence – the call is to love, not to like – but the commandment does mean that we must know that person in Christ, we must see them as Christ sees them, as enemy that even He loves; it is to look at our lives and see the ways that God is present with us and moving towards us, drawing us towards Him, and to realize that that same action is happening in their lives, too; it is, as one person once said, to will their eternal Good.

This is why St. Paul’s words today are about a new life, “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus;” alive to Christ Jesus and praying that our enemies may be alive to Christ Jesus as well, a life made possible only through putting God foremost in our hearts, as the Collect suggests today, “Pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” Amen.