The Word of God, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew (5: 43-48) is very clear: “You have heard that it was said: You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven.”
And the evangelist continues: “For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not the publicans also do the same? And if you salute your brothers only, what else do you do? Do not publicans also do so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
This is perhaps the most difficult text in the Bible and what differentiates the practical Christian from the practitioners of other faiths. Anyone who loves only his own and prays only for his friends does nothing but his religious duty; he only abides by sacred rules, norms and formulas. It is necessary to go beyond what is written, say no to what enslaves, to what discriminates, to love your enemies.
The prayer that pleases God is certainly the one that breaks with dominant ideologies, with current moral and religious standards, that is, that which welcomes and asks for the enemy. Praying, praying only for your friends is easy. I want to see is pray, pray and ask for your enemies.
For your prayer to be fruitful, you must fulfill what Jesus asks: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you”. True prayer is the one that transforms the life of the other.
“Love the enemy”: this is the crux of the matter, that is, Jesus' question is pertinent and echoes to the threshold of history: “For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have?”.
You have to love your enemies and pray for them. Otherwise, we become Pharisees, that is, people who have only fantasies about the true life and advice of the master Jesus.
In a world as violent as ours, where human life has lost all meaning and meaning, where people are killed by any nonsense, we need to untie the knot of violence. Otherwise, the show of violence and indifference tends to keep growing and spreading like the great world epidemic.
- Free yourself from the desire to hurt each other after separation
- Discover your personality type
- who to blame
- the meeting with yourself
- The Most Powerful Prayer – Praying is Good for Health!
- Understand the importance of practicing forgiveness
Almost every day, we watch scenes of robbers being lynched on television. Videos and more videos are made available on the internet with scenes of lynching around the world. In España, this practice has intensified a lot, from small to large cities. In any case, this practice reveals the situation in which we currently live.
I have no doubt, public or virtual lynching of a person is worse than “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. In that old law, only the victim could fight back. Currently, in lynchings, the population manifests the murderous instinct and takes justice into their own hands.
Against all forms of violence, especially the one we witness daily in España, the figure of Mahatma Gandhi is a good example to be followed.
“An eye for an eye, and all mankind will be blinded; tooth for tooth, and all mankind will be toothless,” he said. This is the price of so much violence. We therefore choose non-violence, and we will live in peace.
