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God’s in the middle of Us
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Saturday of the First Week of Lent
Matthew 5:24
Jesus said, “Pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good.”
Again today, Jesus is stirring up trouble.
“Love your enemies,” he says. Don’t leave “bad-enough” alone, but pray for them, do good deeds for them. In Romans 12, Paul has the same message, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil … do not overcome evil by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Teresa of Avila is famous (probably apocryphally) for berating God when her cart was stuck for the umpteenth time in mud on a road far from home, “God, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them!”
There’s intimacy in Teresa’s “prayer.” Telling God what she thinks and how she feels, and not holding back. She pours fuel on the fire of their friendship. Enemies deserve no less; rather than judging them at arm’s length, love them. This, Paul says, embarrasses them and sometimes turns the tide back toward grace and love.
Writing Life Together in the Nazi Germany of 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer applied this passage to spiritual community. Regardless of the beliefs and actions of others, he says “spiritual love knows that it has no immediate access to other persons. Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward brethren really is …
“Spiritual love will meet the other person with the clear Word of God and be ready to leave him alone with this Word for a long time. This spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ. It knows the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ.”
This idea of Christ standing between me and my enemy frees me from fear and drives my forgiveness. Prayer flows much more honestly when I realize my place: I have “no immediate access.” Only through God OUR Father do I have authentic relationship with anyone, including those who persecute me.
God bless us, every one. There is only one river, there is only one sea, and it flows through all of us. No man is an island entire of himself. Lord, let me recollect this relationship, especially with those I would otherwise hate. Help me to pray for them, and even ask them to pray for me.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1342
