Loving your enemies

Soon after September 11th George W

Soon after September 11th George W. Bush was reported as saying that he would not waste an expensive missile on a terrorist tent in Afghanistan. Some days later a letter appeared in this newspaper pointing out what a sad world we live in. Some people had so much money they could build expensive missiles, while others were so poor that they had to live in tents. It was a point worth noting.

The famous German theologian Karl Rahner spent his life writing about the connection between our love for God and our love of our neighbour. For Rahner the two were intrinsically linked. You can't claim to love God and forget about your neighbour.

In the Gospel read in Catholic churches tomorrow, Jesus cures 10 lepers and only one of them returns to thank and praise him. (St Luke 17: 11-19). Significantly, the one who came back to say thank you was "the foreigner". He also "gave praise to the Lord".

"Praise the Lord" is a phrase we often see on billboards and hear in our churches. We can feel holy using such a phrase, but it is also an easy phrase to use. What does it actually mean?

READ MORE

You could go a step further and say it's easy to say and might well have no meaning at all, especially when it is said out of context. And surely it has to be out of context when we forget about our neighbours and our relationships with them.

It can be easy to turn religion into empty words, to make it amorphous. The Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot summed up that sort of religion when he spoke of churches as no longer being wanted except for "important weddings".

Our belief in God has everything to do with our neighbour and our relationship with our fellow sisters and brothers. We might well argue about which comes first, our love of God or our love of neighbour, and it might well be a theological nicety, but if we ever dare take our neighbour out of the equation we are killing off any attempt at getting close to God.

So when we talk about loving and praising God we are also clearly stating that we are committed to loving and praising our neighbour. And do we do that? Or is it just empty, pious talk? And the Gospel doesn't restrict our love and praise to our friends and close ones. We are commanded to love our enemies. That's a tall order. It sounds almost impossible and yet it is at the heart of the Christian message.

So when it comes to firing missiles at tents we are clearly forced into asking ourselves what Christianity has to say about all this. Surely as Christians we should be shouting from the rooftops that there is cruel and unfair distribution of the world's goods. While some people live in abject poverty others live in extraordinary wealth. That is simply not the Christian way of doing things and if we shrug our shoulders at such realities, we are closing our hearts and minds to the Word of God.

In the past few weeks the Western world has become gung-ho. It seems the problem of terrorism can be solved with bombs and guns. Have we not learned that terrorism and all forms of hatred grow and feed out of disadvantage and alienation? People who never experience love grow to hate.

The message of the Gospel is centred on love - God's love for us and our love of God. But all talk of our love for God is meaningless unless we first love one another and that includes our enemy. It might well sound a madness but that is part of the radical and amazing message of the Gospel.

In tomorrow's Gospel the "foreign leper" comes back to praise God. He is moved by God's love for him and he is the one who impresses Jesus. The parable should give hope to those who find themselves in the minority, those who are marginalised and seldom listened to.

The other nine lepers never bothered coming back to praise God or say "thank you". Like all the New Testament parables, this story is highly relevant today.

The next time we say "praise the Lord", we might stop for a second or two and ask ourselves what we mean.

M.C.