"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you," turn the other cheek, says Jesus, and it sounds a bit like a pacifist manifesto, but isn't. Our Lord is not issuing a divine command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff forbidding the use of lethal force in a just war or self-defense. He is ordering us to love our enemies, which means willing what's good for them and acting accordingly.
This doesn't mean we've got to like or agree with them, much less feel romantically inclined towards them, but we must will and act in their best interest as opposed to lashing out in wrathful hate-filled vengeance upon them when they attempt to destroy us. So tempting, don't do it. Our Lord sums up the spirit of the thing:
Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven..."
Love, mercy, forgiveness. Divine values which conform our hearts to the heart of Christ, instead of the satanic anti-values, vices, of hatred, vengeance and wrath. Embrace the former. That in mind, a churchman came up to me after Mass and said:
"Father LSP, I've thought a lot about those verses and know them by heart, but here's the thing. A few years back someone stole all the tools out of the back of my truck in Itasca," bear in mind, readers, that this is a contractor who needs those tools for his livelihood. He continued, "Well, we got his license plate on a game cam and reported it to the police, who did nothing."
"Huh," I replied, "That's entirely useless," and he agreed, "Right, so what we did was trace that plate to an address, a meth lab, loaded up with AR15s and shotguns and paid those boys a night time visit." I pondered the scene:
Midnight, meth lab, pock-marked malfeasants cooking away under fluorescents with a shop full of stolen tools as our guys turn up, weapons hot, "What then?" My friend looked me in the eye and said, "They gave us our tools back. Was I wrong, Father?" I looked him right back in the eye and replied, "No, you were not. Good thing the place didn't blow up, eh?"
If you had told me, back in the early '90s, that I'd be a rural mission priest in North Central Texas some 30 years later, I'd have laughed. You know what? I'm not complaining.
Here Endeth The Lesson,
LSP
