Today’s Gospel passage (Lk 6:27–38) is closely connected to and follows from that of last Sunday, in which we heard the account of the Beatitudes according to the evangelist Luke the Evangelist.
Listening to the Beatitudes, we looked at life with the gaze of Jesus Christ, and we saw, as He Himself sees, that in the poor, in the least, in the afflicted, the Kingdom of God is mysteriously present: this poor way of living participates in a unique way in the life of God, in His style of relationship.
What this Kingdom is like, what the style of life in God is, is described in what we have heard today, and we can summarize it in the simple experience of being able to love the other more than one loves oneself.
From what do we deduce this?
Verses 27–30 recount concrete situations of life, things that happen within everyday relationships: it happens that someone takes something that is ours, that harm is done to us, or that we are asked to give something that is important to us. What should we do?
It seems to me that there are two possibilities.
The first is to love the other while taking oneself as the measure: I love as long as loving does not take away anything that I consider vital for me. If loving takes something from me, I stop, because what is mine is more important than the other.
But if this happens, if I love in this way, in reality I am not loving anyone except myself, and everything I do, in fact, I am doing for myself.
But there is another measure, which is to love the other more than I love myself; even more than I love my pain, my need for justice, my right to be compensated, my wounds. To love with this measure means to place the other before all this, or rather, to place before all this the value that I attribute to the relationship with the other, even if he has hurt me.
I do not accept that anything the other takes from me or asks of me, that none of the wounds the other inflicts on me, can prevent me from remaining in relationship with him, because I cannot live without loving the other as he is.
The measure of true love, therefore, is not ourselves.
Who, then, is it? The answer is found in verse 36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
In the Kingdom of God, which Jesus Christ sees present in the poor and the little ones, there is only one way of loving, which is that of the Father: not only are we all called to love in this way, but we can love in this way only because the love of the Father lives in us, is present in us through the Spirit. This is the Kingdom of heaven.
As long as each person strives to love with his own strength, he cannot but remain within his own measure of love; which, however great it may be, is not capable of going beyond itself.
And what happens when one loves in this way, like the Father?
The last verses of today’s Gospel tell us what the result of such a life is, what happens to the one who chooses the Father as the measure of his love.
And it is interesting, because last Sunday we began with a gaze upon the poor, upon those who, in life, are last and struggle to live. Today we conclude with an image that speaks of abundance, of something overflowing, that surpasses every expectation and hope: whoever opens himself to a measure of love according to the style of the Kingdom truly becomes rich, with a richness that truly fills life.
He seems like a loser, like someone incapable of claiming his rights, of doing himself justice as would be honorable and advantageous.
In reality, to such a person will be given a truly special and unique measure of life, that which only those who love know.
Not only does he lose nothing, but by preserving the relationship with both friend and enemy, he finds himself rich in a capacity to love that makes life true and eternal.
+Pierbattista
