The Border of Love
By Fr. David Kendrick
What Jesus actually says today is more like, “You will be perfected,” than, “You must be perfect (Mt 5:48). He isn’t ordering his disciples, then or now, to be flawless and without any error. He is saying that those who follow him and his teaching will be perfected as the heavenly Father of all has always been perfected, and will always be perfected, which takes a little pressure off, until we ask, perfected in what exactly? The answer is starkly laid out in the preceding verses. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44).
No doubt his disciples then must have been shocked at the very practical ways he counseled such love in the verses preceding that command: when someone who can get away with calling himself your master backhands you, offer him the cheek that didn’t get slapped; if an adversary uses the courts to seize your outer tunic, strip the cloak from your naked body and offer it to him right there; if a soldier threatens you into carrying his backpack for a mile, just keep walking a second mile.
We understandably protest. When people love each other, they accept mutual obligations to, and responsibilities for each other. And if people abuse each other as a doormat, or as an objectified means to an end, there is no obligation to love. And so over time the border of our love shrinks. In these and other ways, we make exceptions to our love, we qualify love, we put conditions on our love: I love you, except for those who don’t agree with me…I love you, but…I really don’t like what you’re doing, so…I love you, if…you are loyal to me and do what I want you to do, otherwise…
The One we follow as our Lord and Savior, the One we worship this day as our Lord and our God, the one and only King worthy of our love, does not make exceptions, nor qualies nor puts conditions on love, not our heavenly Father’s love, nor the love that we are learning. It is our love for all that will be perfected, just as our heavenly Father’s love has always been perfected and will always be perfected.
So does this make Christians doormats, never resisting evil (Mt 5:39). Absolutely not. The Biblical scholar Walter Wink has shown how the Greek word translated as “resist” is almost always used in other places to describe the actions of an army marching into battle. Apart from the legitimate self-defense of peoples, our response as Christians to evil is a nonviolent resistance that leaves the door open for restored relationship.
If an authoritarian figure backhands your right cheek with his right hand, turn your left cheek so that if he strikes you again, he’ll have to use his right hand as a fist, as equals fight in the ring. If someone abuses the courts of justice to take your outer tunic, take off the cloak that covers your nakedness, give it to him and walk away. He’ll be the one who exposed someone’s nakedness, which in the Old Testament is worse than being naked. If a soldier with a sword, or a gun, forces you to help him for a mile, which was legal, keep walking the second mile, and it is the soldier who will be in hot water with his commander; and again, you will be the equal of the one who does evil to you. And with equals, the door is open to reconciliation.
Today, in our own time, Jesus does not tell us to not resist evil, but to resist in ways that leave the door open to reconciliation and restored relationship. Today, in our own time, Jesus asks us to take this day just one daily step in perfecting our love by neither qualifying it nor conditioning it. Our God, our heavenly Father, is a God who desires the reconciliation of all to himself, the evil and the good, the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the unjust; because God’s love is perfect, complete, without exception, qualification or condition. And the more we enlarge the border of our love, the more our love will be perfected, and the more like God we will become.
