Preached by Jesus at the end of his famous Sermon on the Mount, this message is disturbing yet totally relevant for the present-day culture when the world seems to be divided up into “tribes” of conflicting perceptions and aims.
He offers a more far-reaching ethic than just keeping commandments, a realm of God ethos. Jesus is saying that the righteousness of this newly launched kingdom of God is more than following rules. It requires and empowers a life yielded to God and neighbor. Jesus wants us to pay attention to what is in our heart for that is at the core of our life.
Still, this is not easy stuff to digest, and our human nature often goes against this instruction to love, do good to, and forgive enemies and those who do bad things to us and others. So, I’m in awe of someone like Antonia Brenner who died at the age of 86. Known as the “Prison Angel,” she left a comfortable life in Beverly Hills to minister in a notorious Mexican prison with a population of 8,000—eventually giving away most of her possessions, putting on a homemade nun’s habit and spending more than 30 years living in a cell to be closer to inmates.
La Mesa was a notorious hellhole where rich drug lords ruled the roost while hundreds of their poorer brethren lived in the cold and squalor amid rats and raw sewage, with no beds, food or even lavatory paper unless their relatives brought supplies. Abusive prison guards contributed to the misery, mistreating the mentally ill and administering cruel interrogations.
Mother Antonia had a neuromuscular disorder called myasthenia gravis and was a twice divorced mother of eight children when she began working with the poor in Mexico in the 1960s. She first began providing basic needs like aspirin and eyeglasses for the prison population.
She sang in worship services, got a contract to sell soda to the prisoners, and used proceeds to bail out low-level offenders. She prepared those killed in gang fights for burial. Inmates reported how Mother Antonia once walked into the middle of a prison riot while bullets flew and tear gas filled the air. When the inmates saw her standing there fearlessly in her habit—the fighting stopped.
At first the Roman Catholic Church declined to give her its support; for many years, as a divorcée she had been unable to take Holy Communion. Early on in her work at La Mesa, she had taken private vows and when the bishops of Tijuana and San Diego heard of her work, they officially accepted her efforts as part of the ministry of the church and at age 50 she was finally a real “sister.” That’s when she moved into the women’s section of the prison to a 10 by 10 foot cell. Her mission constantly expanded from inmates to guards to their families.
“It’s different to live among people than it is to visit them,” she told The Washington Post in 2002. “I have to be with them in the middle of the night in case someone is stabbed, in case someone has a ruptured appendix, in case someone dies.” This was, for her, the “good measure passed down.”
That’s a radical example of what Jesus asks of his followers. I confess that I could not do that. I suspect not many of us could. But what about less extreme situations of our opportunities to comply with what Jesus asks of us? How easy is it to love our enemies and pray for those who hate and even persecute us or those we cherish?
How easy it for African-Americans to love white supremacists? Or the descendants of Holocaust victims to love their families’ murderers? Or the parents of LGBTQ children to pray for those who bullied them, even driving them to take their lives? What about the families and friends of those killed by gun violence? Can they love the murderers?
How easy is it for the mother of a rape victim to love the molester? Or the wife of a drive by shooting victim to love his killer? Or a friend who betrays you and throws you under the bus? How easy, how feasible, how doable is that? I suspect that Jesus knows how near impossible it is to do and how long, if ever, it takes to arrive at a place where we can begin to forgive and love those who harm us.
Jesus doesn’t expect us to ignore wrongdoing or not respond to hurt. He doesn’t propose that we should turn our back on oppression, injustice, and violence in the world. He is saying that we should not react the world would have us react— with aggression and vengeance nor to assume that the only way to address an enemy is with revenge.
Maybe Jesus wants us to begin by resisting evil, not by running away from our enemies and letting them think they have won. Maybe he wants us to love them by telling them how unjust they are being , giving them the opportunity to grow and learn from their behavior and to be open to God’s grace to change their aggressive and hurtful ways. And, in all of it, to show mercy as God does to us.
In the end, when I hear this difficult Gospel, I am challenged by the words of the English novelist, Anna Sewell, who wrote: “There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about religion, but if it does not teach them to be kind to human and beast, it is all a sham.”
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