Second Tuesday of Lent

1 John 2.1-11; Matthew 5.38-end

This week we come to the second of St. John Chrysostom's five paths to repentance - Forgiving our Enemies. Our readings this evening don't mention forgiveness as such but they do talk about love, and neither forgiveness nor love are those things without one another. And so when Jesus or His apostles tells us that we should love our enemies then it is taken for granted that it means we must forgive our enemies, for we can't truly, if at all, love them if we don't forgive them.

I won't apologise for reading again tonight quotations of a 20th century Russian saint, Saint Silouan on this very subject of loving our enemies, that I put in this month's edition of our parish magazine. As I said in the article, these are some of, if not the most challenging words I've read in recent years; so here's what St. Silouan says: "The Lord is love; and He commanded us to love one another and to love our enemies; and the Holy Spirit teaches us this love. The soul that has not come to know the Holy Spirit does not understand how it is possible to love one's enemies. The man who cries out against evil men, who does not pray for them will never know the grace of God.....The grace of God is not in the man who does not love his enemies."

We should just linger over those words to let the sense of them sink in. What Saint Silouan is saying is that if we don't love our enemies then God's Spirit, the Holy Spirit isn't in us. And we only know how to love our enemies through the Holy Spirit because it's the Holy Spirit that teaches us. This highlights a particular point of view that says that we work in co-operation with God, in synergy with Him. We need to do the work of opening our hearts to God by doing our best to obey His commandments and then His Spirit will work in us. We work and live hand in hand with God.

So you see there are no half measures. We can't pick and choose which commandments we want to keep and which we don't. Jesus reminds us of that. Break one commandment and you've broken them all, he tells us. 'Then we are sunk without trace', you might say, 'we've failed before we've started'. Well not quite. God loves us first and so forgives us first and so He always is ahead of us in everything we do, in all our trying. His grace goes before us - 'Go before us O Lord, in all our doings, with thy most gracious favour', are the opening words of an ancient collect, which reminds us of that. So where's the starting point? Well, out of our love for God that He loves us, we are able to respond positively to His commandments and to love not just our friends and neighbours but our enemies also. Who are in fact our 'neighbours' according to Jesus. So if we aren't to be estranged from God we mustn't be estranged from our enemies.

Our enemy can be just about anybody including ourself. How often do we say of somebody 'he's his own worst enemy' when that person isn't acting in his or her own interests? And that can apply to ourself too. We get caught up in all sorts of delusions about ourself which give us a distorted sense of our own self and when pride and vainglory come into the picture too then we are not being the true self at all. It's then we come to what we were talking about last week in recognising our sin and then forgiving ourself. We have become an enemy to ourself and we need to rediscover the real self and love ourself by forgiving ourself all over again. Then when we get back to reality about ourself and love ourself then we are over half way to loving our other enemies.

Jesus can be our enemy when He makes demands upon us that seem too big a call. And then we've got to forgive Him and love Him again and realise that God never asks the impossible of us. Jesus was fully human and He loved His enemies so we can too. "Forgive them Father for they don't know what they are doing" he said as they hammered nails into his hands and feet. Most people outside the Church see Jesus as an enemy. They might not put it in those terms but why are they so hostile to Him if He isn't their enemy?

Being at odds with and even hating our enemy robs us of our peace, steals away our peace of mind, heart, body and soul. So many people are walking about with bodies racked with pain because they are tormented and burdened by an unforgiving spirit. Another quote from St. Silouan: "All men want peace but they do not know how to attain it. Paissy the Great, having lost his temper, begged the Lord to deliver him from irritability. The Lord appeared to him and said, 'Paissy, if thou dost not wish to get angry, desire nothing, neither criticize nor hate any man, and thou wilt have no anger.' Thus every one who renounces his own will before God and other people will always be at peace in his soul; but the man who likes to have his own way will never know peace.....Peace in our souls is not possible if we do not beg the Lord with all our hearts to give us love for all men. The Lord knew that if we did not love our enemies we should have no peace of soul, and so He gave us His commandment: 'Love your enemies.'

So for tonight just three things to ponder on. Love and forgiveness go together - no forgiveness, no love; no love, no forgiveness. Without love for our enemies we cannot be said to love God and more than that His Holy Spirit is absent from us, we don't know God if we don't love our enemies. And last it's love for our enemies that brings us real peace of mind, heart, soul and spirit. Without love, without forgiveness we are for ever distanced from God and for ever troubled.

(Quotations from 'Wisdom from Mount Athos - The Writings of Staretz Silouan 1866-1938' by Archimandrite Sophrony, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press)