Imagine How Bad I'd Be

Finally got enough sleep to continue with Kung.

In the final antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus expressly corrects the Old Testament commandment, "You shall love your neighbor" and the Qumran precept, "You shall hate your enemy."  Instead, he declares: "But I say to you, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.'  According to Luke, this holds also for those who are hated, cursed, insulted;  "Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you,  pray for those who treat you with contempt."  Isn't all this too exaggerated, isn't it taking things too far for the average man? Why does Jesus talk like this?  Is it perhaps on account of our common human nature?  Is ti the result of philanthropy, which finds something divine even in misery?  Perhaps it expresses a universal compassion for all sufferers and serves to eas a conscience troubled y the infinite suffering of the world.  Or is it expounding an ideal of a universal moral perfection?

As anyone who has read my engagement with my enemies here, I've certainly not achieved a lot in this hardest of the many hard teachings of Jesus, no more than the radicalism of his commandments to give past the point where it hurts, the commandment to give up everything and to give the proceeds to those who won't pay it back.  You'd have to be a saint to have achieved this in this life, though I don't see what would be wrong to keep it in mind as an ideal.  I'm tempted to blame the provocation that naturally leads away from this supernatural way of life on Earth but I don't think that's what Jesus had in mind.  

Jesus has a different motive:  the perfect imitation of God.  God can be rightly understood only as the Father who makes no distinction between friend and foe, who lets the sun shine and the rain fall on good and bad, who bestows his love even on the unworthy (and who is not unworthy?).  Through love human beings are to prove themselves sons and daughters of the Father and become brothers and sisters after being enemies.  God's love for all men is for me then the reason for loving the person whom he sends to me, for loving just this neighbor.  God's love of enemies is itself therefore the reason for man's loving of enemies.

It may therefore be asked on the other hand; is not the nature of true love made clear in face only of an opponent?  True love does not speculate on its requital,  does not balance one deed against another, does not expect a reward.  It is free from calculation and concealed self-seeking.  It is not egoistic, but completely open to other persons. 

That last observation is something that it seems to me we can know experientially, how love opens us up past ourselves in a way that doesn't otherwise happen.  It doesn't happen by knowledge without emotional engagement.  You cannot escape being trapped inside your own ego any other way.  Some of the smartest, most intellectually accomplished among us are fixated on the narrowest of things, themselves, as well as many of the stupidest and least interested in ideas.  Our present political pageant stars both in such gaudy exhibition. 

Some of those farthest from this ideal are well versed in religious law, Cannon law, the Scriptures, the entire history of Christianity with civil and political power is strewn with people who certainly knew these passages and long theological engagement with the meaning of them - though that kind of religious figure is generally a lot more fixated on what other people get up to sexually so they can persecute them, hate them, treat them with contempt than they are with the hardest of the incredibly radical commandments of the Rabbi, Jesus.  And if you don't think I'm sorely tempted to name names, right now, you don't know me.   

That's the easy road  to pie in the sky piety and sanctity that has turned into one of the more potent weapons used against Christianity as the following of these hard teachings would earn Christians universal praise and belief. 

As I said, I share in that guilt,though I will say in my defense that I am tempted more by the fun of it than a meaner motive, half of the time, at least.   

Imagine how bad I'd be if I wasn't at least thinking of trying to do better.