Fr Antonio Pineda
his Sunday’s Gospel tells us to “love our enemies” and “be as compassionate as your Father is compassionate”. Two very difficult exhortations. How can we love someone who has hurt us, and how can we equal God in anything?
God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. His unconditional love means that his love is never less than 100 per cent even towards the least deserving. God does not wait for conditions to be right before loving people. And because we are made in the image of God, we are expected to reflect that divine love. Love is a fundamental attitude that does not wait for certain conditions to be right and will not let the wrongs of others pollute its flow of positive energy.
God understands that forgiveness of injustice, abuse or hurt is not easy. After suffering injustice or hurt, our option is not between remembering or forgetting, as if the memory can be simply blotted out. Rather, the important thing is how we remember. When someone hurts us, do we remember with negative thoughts and feelings or do we adopt, however difficult, a positive attitude that transcends the hurt? The Catechism of the Catholic Church advises: “It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offence, but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming hurt into intercession” (#2843). Hand it over to the Holy Spirit to raise our thoughts and feelings to a supernatural level! Instead of revenge, let us pray for a transformation.
To respond to wrongs with bitterness or revenge is to add to the ocean of evil. As Martin Luther King put it, the policy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth would leave the world blind and toothless. Every sense of hatred that we exude makes the world more toxic. Never forget that often the one who appears unlovable is the one who most needs to be loved. Only goodness, trust and tenderness can turn something ugly into something beautiful. Transformation … not revenge.