February 15, 2026 at Saint Peter the Apostle and Saint William Churches in Naples, FL
Sirach 15:15-20 + Psalm 129+ 1 Corinthians 2: 6-10 + Matthew 5: 17-37
Oscar Wilde once observed that “as one reads history, one is sickened, not by the crimes the wicked have committed, but by the punishments the good have inflicted. A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of a crime.” It’s a long way of saying that revenge keeps the cycle of violence or evil going. As I often say to people who confess anger as a sin. There is nothing wrong with anger. Jesus was angry many times, but he was never angry about anything done to him. His anger was in response to things done to the innocent, the week, and the helpless. There is a time when anger is appropriate. But, when anger turns to revenge, we have let the evil enter our souls becoming part of it.
Love your enemies is one of the most revolutionary things ever said. Most revolutionaries say that the enemy must be destroyed. Most of us have a hard-enough time trying to love our friends. After a few years of marriage, many discover that loving your spouse becomes a challenge, and something you have to decide to do every day.
All of us have some “enemies,” or at least some people we positively dislike. If we take time to think about why we dislike them, our reasons are probably a bit shallow maybe even silly. The fact is, there is a deeper reason that has nothing to do with anything offensive or something they have done or said. The real reason underneath it all is that they bring out the worst in us. Enemies expose a side of us which we usually try to keep hidden from our friends, a dark side of our nature which we would rather not know about. The enemy stirs up ugly things inside us which is why we hate them.
It seems to me that to love one’s enemy is not, in the first place, to do them good. Rather, it is to allow them to be different, to be themselves, and not try to turn them into a copy of ourselves so that we may be able to love them. The first movement then toward loving an enemy is simply to let them be – let them be themselves.
I do not believe that Jesus expects us to feel love for our enemy because the love he expects is not a feeling, it is an act of will. It is a decision to respect, tolerate and be patient with someone for whom we do not have loving feelings. Jesus is not talking about feelings. He is talking about love as God knows it. The only way we can love in the way Christ asks of us is with the help of God. When Christ asks us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, the perfection he is talking about is the perfection of love. God loves his children unconditionally. He loves them not because they are good but because he is good. If we want to be good, then we learn from the example of Jesus Christ how to live in peace with those who are not a copy of ourselves. One of us is usually enough.