Homily on loving your enemies

​Loving your enemies is not always easy, especially if you find yourself working with them day in and day out. Have we ever considered, however, that we in fact may be the enemy another person is being called to love? Maybe we are not enemies with anyone to the point of hatred but we might find ourselves butting heads with other people over preferred ways of doing things or by clashes of personality.
​I once head someone say, ‘You have to love everyone, but you don’t have to like everyone.’ Now there is some truth in this statement but it doesn’t reveal the whole truth. Love as we all know is an act of the will but it is not confined to it and so Jesus is calling us to make the choice to love our enemies with the desire of one day also liking them. I firmly believe that this choice to love one’s enemies is not a once and for all deal. It is a daily endeavor, which requires patience, commitment and a genuine knowledge of God as the Father of all. It requires an appreciation for the fact that the love of God, which is unconditional towards us is also unconditional towards those whom we may consider enemies or those whom we don’t regard as close friends.
​Living in community really puts this call to love without limits to the test. Think about it, though none of us here are enemies of one another, we do live in a community made up of many unique personalities and qualities which may not always jive with our way of doing things. For example, we have the extrovert who walks down the hallway of the group area singing loudly which could be annoying to the introvert who is reading in his room.  Or we have the person who shows up late for every meeting. This showing up late could be a scourge for a person for whom being late is an insult.
​In a community such as ours, seldom if ever are we going to be confronted with the experience of having an enemy, and the temptation could arise where we see today’s gospel as being not applicable to us because we don’t have any enemies. But I think it would be fair to define an enemy as anyone whom we don’t actively pursue with love. I would like to repeat this definition. An enemy is anyone whom we are not actively pursuing in love. As we live life in community we are confronted daily with each other and this common life often presents us with experiences that we could say gets on our nerves. These pet peeves provide us an opportunity to reflect upon how well we are able to actively pursue one another with the love of Christ.
​We are a people baptized into the life of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; eternally engaged in a life of self-emptying love. We are called to reflect this life and love in our community. The Words of Jesus today invite us to discover in our pet peeves a further avenue by which to actively pursue in love the friend waiting to be made out of every enemy.