When Jesus started out on His preaching career in the years before His trial and suffering, He gave people this strange teaching about love for enemies. It stops us in our tracks. Can it possibly be done? In little things we find it easy to forgive one another, to forgive those we love, but to be kind to our enemies seems to be beyond our abilities. Why should we be good to those who hate or hurts us? The answer is because the Lord is asking us to become something very different. We are being asked to become children of the living God. We cannot presume to be God’s children if we do not listen to what the Lord is asking us to do. God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. We are being asked to be like this, to be like God. We are not being asked to give in to others or to their wickedness. Remember Jesus and the man who struck Him in the face.
The Lord seeks for the sinner to repent, and for those who can, to help in the work of rehabilitation, of bringing a person back to life. For loved ones who have been wickedly hurt by the actions of others, the pain of loss can bring on the even worse suffering of unending hatred or deep depression. For example, so many lives are blighted by the loss of loved ones in car crashes. Some of these events are tragic accidents; but others are the result of human carelessness. By ourselves these traumas are too great for us to bear. We need God’s grace to help us cope with the evils that are done under the sun. We are not meant simply to let things go. In the end Jesus was put on a cross and prayed that people be forgiven because they do not understand the terrible things they do. A soldier listening nearby was moved to say, “in truth this man was a son of God.” Compassion is the power that heals. Do we have it?