This year, with my friends in the Focolare Movement, I am being asked to deepen that mysterious saying of Jesus, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, a phrase which Our Lord puts next to the first, and only Commandment. It is a wonderful programme of a whole year’s practical ‘in-service’ training.

Most of those at a Focolare Mariapolis in 2011 in Wales

 In the New Testament, we find a consistent teaching, to the effect that, if we say we love the God we cannot see, but do not love the neighbour next to us that we do see, then we are not loving God at all! Without spending too much time on this issue, the phrase Jesus uses in the ‘Our Father’, is also very much to the point: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. 

My experience demonstrates that the best way to know Jesus, or God, or the Holy Spirit, (i.e. receive his salvation, his presence, what we call ‘grace’), is through the forgiveness of our sins, and this is utterly linked to the way I consider – treat – my neighbour. I can say, in all truth, that if I want to love God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind and with all my strength, then the ‘pathway’ – the method – is through the love of my neighbour. It is only by God’s gift (grace) that I am able to love God and my neighbour, and the conclusion to which I am driven here, is that the two Commandments we invariably quote, are really just One Commandment.

Recently, I have been in the company of people who have commented on the challenges of being disciples of Jesus. One comment was made in relation to last Sunday’s Gospel, and this throws out a challenge, focused precisely  on the ‘Focolare’ programme for the year:

“At Church today we heard all about love, and we were told that we should love everybody to be a disciple of Jesus. But how can I love those who have really hurt me badly? I find I hate them?”  

The person who asked this incisive question happens to be an unbaptized, intelligent young mother, who attends our sessions of ‘Journey in Faith’.   Now, I ask: “Who can answer such a question from human logic?” As I did not want to give an unhelpful ‘stereotyped’ answer, I left it first to the others to make their comments known.  One said:

“I have found that it is best, for your own good, not to hate others. It does nothing except make you yourself more agitated, so it is far better just to let go of your own feelings and let it pass over your head. It does no good to have hateful feelings anyway.” 

Another said: 

“I think it is possible to hate the bad thing, the evil, the really heinous act that has happened. I can reject and hate that. But the person who did it is another thing. I do not have to hate them”. 

Still another commented:

“I have had bad things done to me by my family. I find that I did hate them but things pass over, and family ties are there. I cannot deny they are my own flesh and blood. I do not wish them any harm, but I would not invite those particular family members into my close personal life again. If they were in need I would help them. There is no need to make them a really close friend but I do not have to hate them”. 

Another shared his experience about a close relative, who it is very ‘difficult to love’, and more so for his wife and daughter than himself. Somehow, he has put what happened behind him, and can tolerate the family member.  Another found it not such a difficulty not to hate others, but agreed that if somebody really hurt her child she would find it difficult not to retaliate.

At the end of this discussion, I found myself quoting Jesus from the Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you; if a person strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other etc. etc.” Jesus is quite clear – there is another way; he does not compromise about ‘loving everybody’; but how does one achieve it? How would you love a ‘Hitler’ or a ‘Stalin’?  To help solve the ‘Hitler’ or ‘Stalin’ challenge, somebody once pointed out that, when they were born as a baby, their mothers must have loved them.

I pointed out that we are all on a ‘journey in faith’, and that when we are baptized we are ‘in Christ’. So, it is possible to put on the mind of Christ, and that is the aim of the Christian life; however, we won’t achieve it all the time, even if, by the grace of God, we can ‘give ourselves to God’. I experience that I go, ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the mind of Christ, according to my mood, or according to the events that have happened – particularly, if I have let the ‘old-man-in-me’ take over. I suspect that it is all linked to Jesus’ words: “I come from above, you come from below”. Our task is to enter where he lives, in what Jesus calls, ‘the above’. It is all a gift of grace, to ‘be in Christ’, and, as all of us have different temperaments, different experiences of life, different ways of behaving, each person has to make a step of trusting faith, in their own appropriate way.

At the end of the day, the matter would be resolved if I really did ‘know Jesus’. Once I know him, then I can think, and love, in his way, not in my own purely ‘human’ way. The prayer I would urge all to make, is firstly, that ‘I know that Jesus loves me immensely’, then, ‘I do his will’, then ‘I listen and take to myself his Word that teaches me his will’;  overall, I pray always that God’s grace will always be in me.

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