A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, you have heard the commandment, you shall love your countryman but hate your enemy. My command to you is love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. This will prove that you are sons of your heavenly father.
For his son rises on the good as well as upon the bad. He reigns on the just and the unjust. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? Do not tax collectors do as much? And if you greet only your brothers, what is so praiseworthy about it?
Do not pagans do as much? In a word, you must be perfected as your heavenly father is perfect. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. It's important this morning that you take that first reading very closely connected with this second reading. Because our blessed Lord in this second reading, which is just a few sentences lifted out of one of the gospels, If you just take those few sentences and exclude everything else that our blessed lord said and did, you can come up with some rather peculiar doctrine, Not a doctrine of lack of love for your fellow human being, but it might exclude God. And what we have to remember as Christians and as our blessed Lord explicitly, translucently, most obviously taught was that God comes first. You don't have to be a Christian to love your neighbor.
Socrates loved his neighbor. There have been plenty of heroes and I suppose some heroines, but we mostly know about the heroes in classical times, in Greek in Greece, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. Plenty of literally plenty of high minded, noble men and women who weren't Christians. The point we have to remember that Christ came to bring us closer to God Almighty. That is absolutely fundamental if we're going to have our thinking straight, that God comes first.
That I that I am committed my by my very existence to God almighty. Now this is something the pagans knew well. The pagans knew this very well. Don't ever identify paganism with atheism. The pagans were over in many instances, the pagan world of Greece and of Rome, these worlds were overwhelmed with the presence of god.
And today, Hindu mysticism, the Eastern religions which are proving so popular in certain parts of this country, they put they they all, without exception, put the supreme being first in our acknowledgment of that supreme being and our efforts to be aware of that in our daily living. Now if our blessed lord asks us to be perfect, notice that's what he says. Notice he says that, that as your heavenly father is perfect, so must you aim at perfection. You see, we Christ said that. I'm not telling you that.
Our blessed Lord said that. And unless unless we try notice, he didn't say you had to succeed, but you must try. And this means putting God first. And Jesus Christ is God, remember. And so when we talk about love of neighbor and and being different from the pagans and turning the other cheek, and being kind to our neighbor, and loving to our neighbor, and generous to our neighbor, and thoughtful of our neighbor, even where neighbor means my enemy.
Even when my neighbor means those who persecute me. The point is this, if there if that if this is as far as you go, you haven't gone far enough. That is not being a Christian. That might be being a very good atheist, a very good agnostic, and certainly perhaps a very good pagan, but not a Christian. What has got to come into this picture of fraternal charity is God.
That we see God almighty in our neighbor, in our enemy, in those who persecute us, that we that we try to be aware of god almighty in them. And that we are, therefore, our relationships with all other human beings, that these relationships are not defined in terms of the merely human. Altruism, philanthropy, brotherly love, sisterly love. These are not Christian terms. The Christian term is Christian charity.
It's a love which keeps Christ in it. And if it if Christ isn't in it, it doesn't mean it's bad. There is such a thing as natural virtue, remember. But it isn't Christian unless Christ is in it, unless we see Jesus Christ in those around us. And when I say those around us, let's not think of the Eskimo.
Let us not think of of some foreign parts. Let us think of the people we're rubbing shoulders with today, beginning with our own families. They are our neighbors. Sometimes they are our persecutors. Let's face it, at least we think they are.
But there's where we have to begin Christian love. Because as long as we say, oh, I love mankind, I love the poor. Forget it. There's no such thing as the poor. There's no such thing as mankind.
The only thing that exists are individual human beings with histories, with names, with futures, and with the present, and with a relationship with me. And they are the ones we must love, not for myself, not for themselves, but for god's self, for our lord self. We must see Jesus in all men because he became man for all men. The name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen.