Mt 5,43-48 – Tuesday of the XI Week of Ordinary Time
“Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.” Probably no word of the Gospel appears to us as demanding as this one. Yet it is precisely here that Jesus reveals to us the most profound novelty of Christianity. In fact, the love he talks about does not simply coincide with a feeling or an emotion. If it were only this, it would be impossible to love those who have hurt, disappointed or made us suffer.
Evangelical love is first and foremost a choice. It is an act of freedom. It means deciding not to let the harm we receive determine our way of life. It means refusing to surrender our hearts to resentment, revenge, or hatred. This is why Jesus does not ask us to feel sympathy for our enemies, but to love them. And love, in this case, it means desiring the good even of those who have not behaved well towards us. The motivation that Jesus offers is decisive: “so that you may be children of your heavenly Father”. In other words, when we love in this way, we make the very face of God visible. The Father in fact makes the sun rise on the good and the bad and makes it rain on the just and the unjust. His love is not selective, it is not a reward for those who deserve it, but a gift that precedes any merit.
Very often, however, we live according to a logic of reciprocity. We love those who love us, we respect those who respect us, we are generous with those who are generous with us. But Jesus points out to us that this behavior is nothing extraordinary. It’s the normal way of life for anyone. The Christian difference emerges when we choose good even where we do not receive well, when we continue to love even where we do not find correspondence. This doesn’t mean becoming naive or allowing others to walk all over us. It means guarding an inner freedom that no one can steal from us. It means not living simply as a mirror of the situations around us, but as people guided by the Gospel. The true identity of the Christian is not what he says he believes, but the way he loves. It is there that one sees his belonging to God. It is there that the Gospel becomes credible. It is there that the world can glimpse something of the Father’s face.
Tuesday 16 June 2026 – (Tuesday of the XI Week of Ordinary Time – Even Year)
