SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME — Year C
*Alternate* Second Reading: by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Let us be practical and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?
First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive… Forgiveness does
not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It
means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.
Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor,
the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that they are.
An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy.
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we
discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the
surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a
measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of their acts are
not quite representative of all that they are. We see them in a new light. We
recognize that their hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and
misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in
their being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad
and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.
The words of Martin Luther King, Jr.