In the gospel passage today, Jesus teaches us the core value of the Kingdom of God – Love. He also instructs on how to handle instinctual hate and violence. The gospel passage on love in Luke must be read together with the elaborate treatise on love in the gospel of John and the canticle of love by Saint Paul. Teaching humanity how to love, the saga of the Son of God culminates on the cross by becoming pure love, refusing to hate even in the face of violent torture and death.
The foundation of love is an instinctual drive found in all animals. It is inevitable for the propagation and preservation of the species. The expression of instinctual love is found between parents and offspring or between mates. Instinctual love is mostly reciprocal. An unforgettable story of instinctual love was recorded in a newspaper some time ago. A male hornbill was hit and fell dead by a passing SUV in the forest area. Even in the throes of death, the bird had refused to let go from its beaks, the berries he had collected for his mate and brood. On hearing the story, a bird lover realized that the bird family would be waiting for the food somewhere close and found the exhausted mate and brood in the hole of a tall tree. Sadly, a few days later, the whole bird family perished, despite valiant efforts from bird lovers to take care of them. Even birds are capable of such exemplary instinctual love. The invitation of Jesus is to go beyond the instincts to love those who dislike you, hate you, and even harm you.
To reach the ideal level of loving, it is required, first of all, to handle our own dislike for others. The gut reaction must be overcome with an ideological positioning. Where my gut reaction is to hate and be violent, I choose to love and forgive. It is not a status achieved overnight. It requires uninterrupted training of the mind. It requires seasoned mental skills to overcome our temptations, fight and hurt. To make a personal check of the practice of this virtue, think of the last time when you had a gut reaction to use violent words on others; did you choose otherwise? When was the last time that you forgave someone without reserve?
When the external expressions of hatred and anger are controlled from outside, without one’s own choice, the mind can turn bitter and make itself a battleground, sometimes harming oneself. It requires personal choices and repeated drills to calm the natural agitations that follow the suppression of hatred. The choices and control can be easier when we can convince ourselves that we are on the way to becoming nobler Christians.
Hatred and violence could be perpetrated collectively. Collective hatred is germinated and maintained by retelling stories of the injured ego of oneself, of common ancestors, or threats from imagined enemies. These stories become highly productive factories of hatred and violence. The perpetrators of the stories could be families, clans, tribes, political parties and religions and countries. In a religious milieu, a person is at a highly suggestible self. If hatred is infused as part of a religious ritual, the mind accepts them without questions. Collective violence has found its vent in scapegoating and human sacrificial rites in the past. Well, there are new political rituals of scapegoating and human sacrifices.
The invitation of Jesus is quintessentially a personal appeal to abhor hatred and practice love by doing good to those who act with evil intents, and by practicing restraint and forgiveness. But it also needs to be extended to collective practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. Unfortunately, we often become the stories we tell. If we keep telling stories of hurt and hatred, we become violent. If we retell stories of redemption and forgiveness, we become agents of peace. Repair today a hurt story and retell it as a redemption story, and you will notice a smile spread across your face unawares!