Carvajal: Christianity, a radical religion

“…love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you… If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them.” Luke 6: 27, 32.

On Christmas Eve, I wrote about God becoming man in order to teach us how we can be true and fully human beings. Today, New Year’s Eve, I write about Jesus calling us to be a notch more than human. For what can be more counter-intuitive than those words of Jesus to his disciples. We have a hard enough time reciprocating the kindness of friends and neighbors; yet now we are told to love our enemies. How crazy is that from an instinctively human point of view!?

Yet, there is no mistaking the meaning of Christ’s words in Luke’s gospel. If we take Christ seriously, we are really called to soar beyond our humanity on to the realm of the divine. For it takes a touch of superhuman or divine intelligence for us to see our way into loving our enemies. It takes a dose of divinity to throw bread back at those who throw stones at us. Christ’s words rub our human instincts the wrong way. Yet there they are, clear as day.

We all come from one common source of consciousness that we call by many names depending on our religious affiliation. As coming from that one source, for being members of the human race that is, we are challenged to be human to one another. But Christ hurls at Christians a much higher and nobler challenge, something that grates against every fiber of our being, the challenge to be divine and love our enemies.

That brings up the question of how to love our enemies? Like how do we love those who cheated our people and caused them to die or suffer displacement, hunger and ill-health with their ghost and sub-standard flood control projects? How do we love those who caused our mountains to be denuded as a consequence of which rains more easily converge into destructive floods? And how, some of you might also ask, do we love former President Duterte with his alleged extrajudicial killings.

In Catholic Christian terms we can only pray that they admit, confess, and feel sorry for their sins. In human political terms, however, we have to haul them to our courts of law. (I said our courts because I disagree with surrendering Duterte, and with him our sovereignty, to a foreign court.) In both terms, Christians must demand for penance and atonement. We will fail to love them if we let them off the hook and let them carry on with their inhuman and un-Christian behavior. The point here is that we do all these not from a motive of hate or revenge but of love. Not an easy thing to do but something Christians must do.

Christianity is a radical religion. To be truly and fully human is a universal call. Christians, however, have a higher calling. We become true Christians only when we answer the call to be at least a touch divine and love our enemies and do good to those who do bad to us. It’s really that hard to be a true Christian, a true follower of Christ.

Here’s wishing all a divinely Blessed and Prosperous New Year.