Weren't last week's readings enough? "Blessed are the poor." Now, it's "love your enemies."  That's pretty hard to take. So rather than jump straight into the Gospel, let's start with our gentle Psalm refrain, "The Lord is kind and merciful."  

First of all, the word "kind." While we may have human images of kindness, in Scripture the word refers primarily to God. We find the prototype description of God's compassion or kindness in Exodus 22:26, which reveals that God always hears the cry of the poor. We can't get away from that simple fact — God pays special attention to the poor.

Like kindness, the word merciful also refers first to God. Once again, Exodus offers instruction, describing multiple attributes of divine mercy. In Exodus 34 we read that the Lord is gracious (kind), merciful, slow to anger, abounding in love and fidelity, loving for a thousand generations and forgiving. In the New Testament, the word for mercy, eleos, indicates an insatiable desire to relieve the suffering of another. Unlike pity, which looks on another with care, mercy allows the other to get under your skin such that you feel impelled to do something about what is plaguing them. It's a profound expression of love and solidarity, the choice to be in union with another.  (These must be essential ingredients of marriage and friendship.)

In his book Jesus Today, Albert Nolan suggests that love of another recognizes that we are already one with each other, that all of creation is bound together and separateness is nothing more than a misperception of reality. As in God's kindness and mercy, love of another implies an ever-growing embrace of our oneness — not as a goal, but as a fact that orients our thinking and therefore, our actions. 

When I recognize my oneness with others, Jesus' call to love the enemy takes a wholly (holy) new meaning. If I love my enemy as myself — even one who does me and/or others great harm — I will treat that person more like a wound than a threatening outsider. When we are wounded, we provide the maximal conditions for healing. So when someone seems to stand against me, the thing to do is pray for healing and avoid making the wound worse by irritating it. 

Today, Jesus' instructions get a particular focus. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." In a globalizing world, that means that we approach others as mysteries to be understood. My tendency to give another what I would want misses the mark because it starts with me. Instead, in this age of synodality, we need to give one another something much deeper — the opportunity to be heard and understood as who they really are, not who we think they are. To treat them as they desire. (Do not judge.) It's easy to love those we understand, it's far more humanizing to learn to understand those who think differently from ourselves. 

Jesus promises that when we do these things, our "reward will be great." That isn't a promise of a high place in heaven, as if there were degrees of being in the fullness of God's presence. That's a promise that both we and society will change for the happier as we do these things.  

We will grow beyond our drive for individual self-preservation, realizing that we thrive only when all thrive. Picking and choosing who we will love and who we will not, is self-destructive behavior. Avoiding those we don't understand — or don't want to understand — is like living on junk food: We miss the nourishment of the diversity of who we really are together. We're stunting the growth we can experience when we allow ourselves to be drawn forth in new ways by different kinds of people.

Like the Beatitudes, which sound like an upside-down path to happiness, Jesus' ongoing instructions offer us an enigmatic invitation to human flourishing. As with the risk involved in any choice to love, moving beyond the backyard of our social, national, linguistic, racial and class circles give birth to new depths of being in us.  

Because Jesus tells us to be merciful as our Father is merciful, we can believe that loving our enemies is possible. God's kindness and mercy are graces to which we can be open because God lives in us and with us. Faith assures us that we are capable of cooperating with grace. Today, we are invited to be among those who really hear what Jesus is saying.  

The first statement of blessing summarizes Jesus' Beatitudes: "Blessed are you who are poor." In contrast, he warns, "Woe to you who … have your consolation."  

What is this word, "Woe," in Greek, ouai? (It's pronounced sort of like a combination of "ooph!" and "ay" and means something like "Look, it's awful!") Jesus' woes describe people who are content with the status quo, who, like the singer of "Nobody Knows You," base their self-worth on what they have and how their wealth could purchase all they think they need, along with celebrity and companionship to boot.

Back to the keynote statement, "Blessed are you who are poor." What is this word "blessed"? Makarios in Greek, it is usually translated as blessed or happy. A good hint about its meaning comes from the first time it appears in Luke's Gospel (1:45) when Elizabeth says to Mary, "Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled." To be blessed means to have such hope in God's future that you gladly bet your life on it.  

This summarizes each of Jesus' blessings and helps us to interpret them. Jesus is not idolizing destitution, starvation, desolation or marginalization. He's talking about a mindset that seems to come most easily to people who hope, not from a position of strength, but from an awareness that God's future is better than anything we could ask or imagine. These are the people who, in the words of Pope Francis, are "waiting for something that has already been given to us," people who welcome the free gifts of God every day, knowing that every gift is for the good of all. (See 1 Corinthians 12.)

The blessed poor know the truth that is best discovered from the underside of society: nobody deserves what they have. No one earned the right to be born, much less the privileges that came afterward. Those who can see from the underside know this and see clearly the fragility of the position of those who consider themselves powerful. They know that we will all die and that life is a free gift.

The blessed people who are hungry or weeping are those who, like Mary and all people of the Resurrection, know that evil and suffering are not God's plan and that nothing can overcome the love of God. They know that the evil are "like chaff that blows away in the wind"; in spite of their self-importance, they are tragic, empty shells of what could have been a flourishing human life. 

Whereas Matthew situates his version of this address on a mountain crowded with people from all over, Luke tells us that the great crowd Jesus addressed consisted of only "disciples." That sets a different tone, making this not a general teaching but a direct address to those who would be his followers. 

If we convert Jesus' statements into a survey, it offers some thought-provoking questions for us as individuals and as communities about whether we are ready to live this way. The survey might look something like, with an answerable scale of 1-5:

• I/we rely on God and community over money, position or our own plans.
• I/we feel the suffering around us, to the point that our desire for solutions creates a hunger that plagues us.
• I/we desire such solidarity with victims of war, injustice and impoverishment that we weep with them, impelled to find solutions to the imbalances of our world.
• I/we care little or nothing about the criticism, mockery or demotions we may receive for standing with the most vulnerable.

What do we learn about ourselves — and our faith communities — through our answers?