In Alabama, it is illegal to drive blindfolded. What? In Arizona, it’s illegal for a donkey to sleep in a bathtub. What? In Arkansas, you can’t honk your horn near a sandwich shop after 9pm. What? Here in Washington state, in the county of Skamania it is illegal to harass bigfoot. What? Make it make sense.These laws might sound absurd, but they are real, and they obviously made it into the books for a reason… somewhere down the line someone did something that ruined it for the rest of us!

(I was that person in the seminary… The seminarian handbook which has the doo’s and don’ts of living in the seminary, under “pets” it said, “pets are not allowed except a small fish tank.” It didn’t specify what you could keep inside that fish tank, so I took liberty in interpreting that rule. After the rector found out I was keeping a tarantula and a colony of cockroaches to feed the tarantula, the rule was revised to “pets are not allowed except one small fish tank with small fish, after the approval of your formator.” Wops!)

Anyway, back to laws that seem strange. Some people might think that about laws that govern aspects of the faith. In Catholicism, one must not eat meat on Fridays of lent, but you can eat fish, reptiles, and even those cute looking puffins – they are not considered “meat.” What? Make it make sense.

Perhaps this was the reacting people had with Jesus with his own commands to his disciples: if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other. If someone wants to steal your cloak, do not resist, rather give them more than they ask for. What?

This teaching of Jesus comes in the middle of the beatitudes, his first and major teaching, which in Luke’s version is being written for a Greek audience, so they only make sense in the context of Greek culture.

Greeks valued enmity and feuding; they believed that citizens had the right to harm someone being hostile to them. Revenge was justice. A common phrase at that time was “do harm to one’s enemy and be of service to one’s friend.” That made sense, but it also had limitations. People will always oppose you in some way, so living with a constant desire for revenge is not only exhausting but makes society unstable.

Greeks had realized maybe it would be a good idea to be friends, at some level, with the enemy and not be angry all the time. For this they came up with a new concept; that there where different types of love; philia, eros, storge, ludus, pragma, philautia and agape, each corresponding to a different type of person. This made it possible to love those closest to you the most and at least show a bit of practical concern for someone not as close, including your enemy, but it still did not address the ills that come with having revenge as part of the culture.  

Scripture reveals to us that enmity is one of the problems that keeps humanity in sin, and from the beginning of revelation God has been moving us away from the desire to seek revenge as a form of justice. We can see that movement in the first reading: Saul and David are mortal enemies. Saul is trying to be sneaky and surprise attack David, but David manages to find him first as Saul is sleeping. Conveniently there is a spear right next to his head and he had every right to kill his enemy and save himself and his people, “and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was the ancient Jewish version of enmity. It was the obvious thing to do, made sense, even his partner says “God himself has set this up for you, take revenge now, or let me do it, let me nail him to the ground with one trust of the spear; I will not need a second thrust!”

But instead, David says “no, I will not harm him, because I know God, for some reason, likes him.” David was not being moved by his own personal love or concern for Saul, but because he knew God himself favored him. He was beginning to realize that though at a human level killing Saul made sense, at a level he did not understand, at the level of the spiritual, it was not right.

The mission of Jesus was to reveal how enmity was still hidden in the human heart, and provide a different form of justice. In the gospel, Jesus takes the human forms of love proposed by the Greeks especially agape (selfless love) and elevates it to the spiritual by applying to himself, conquering evil with good, infusing it with divine power, and then sharing that power with his disciples through the Spirit, and then demanding they do the same.

This was important because the new Christian community would be experiencing new forms of discrimination and hate… he had just told them “blessed are you when they insult you and utter all kinds of evils against you because of my name.” The obvious answer for these new Greek Christians would be to seek revenge as they law said they could, but that would just make the Church another political movement governed by the rules that come from a human heart that seeks enmity, making it unstable and eventually be destroyed as it came into competition with other human powers.

Jesus did not come to simply help us control our sin, our enmity, he came to overcome it. The Church exists as the antidote to human vengeance and violence, and that can only happen through the transformation of enmity into love.

Jesus had every human right and justification to practice enmity, yet at every moment he responded with divine love. During the crucifixion, while he is being mocked and ridiculed, he utters nothing but beatitudes, blessings, divine love on those cursing him: “Father, forgive them for they know now what they do.” When the thief, the one who was getting “what he deserved” asks for compassion, Jesus will say to him “amen I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The result of living under this new law is the conversion of a heart to those who witness it. At the crucifixion after Jesus commends his spirit to the Father, the centurion standing at the foot of the cross, who was probably thinking “he is getting was he deserved” is moved to says “this man was innocent beyond doubt.” His enmity turns into faith.

St. Paul says that the first Adam was first human, giving human earthly life, abiding by the rules that govern human society, but the second Adam, Christ, is heavenly, giving us a new rule that is not human, it is spiritual, operating outside the realm of what we think is right and just. To be a Christian then is to no longer be earthy first, but spiritual. We are in this world, but we are not of it (John 17:16), or as my favorite theologian Teilhard de Chardin put is, “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

All of that lies behind the commands that Jesus says to his disciples… “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, to the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other as well.” While it might sound illogical, weak and submissive, when understood in the context of the Spirit as a participation of the love of God on the cross, it is anything but passive, it is a command to exercise divine love so as to overcome evil with good lest we continue to be evil ourselves justified and hidden behind human justice. It frees us from enmity.

Take for example the command to turn the other cheek. If someone was structed on the cheek the law stated they had to keep their head down, to be submissive, because who struct you was most likely someone of power over you, a master to a slave. They might be submissive but inside they were probably being consumed by the desire for revenge, and the aggressor was just enabled to continue abusing their power.

By Jesus commanding turn their other cheek, he is saying lift up your head. He was asking them to not follow erroneous human law, it was a call to spiritual rebellion, a command to look at the aggressor in the eye, but the challenge will be to look at them differently, not with enmity, not with a desire for revenge, but with the eyes of divine love, letting the aggressor know you are not less than them, but you are not greater than them either, you are an equal. Divine love demands that we uphold the dignity of all people, even those whom human wisdom says do not deserve it.

This is the law of Christianity, and it put us Catholics, once again, in an uncomfortable position when humans laws, as much as sense as they may make, also seem to contradict divine law. That is the tension I see happening with the comments of Catholic vice president JD Vance.

In an interview, when asked about mass deportations, he used the Christian principle of Ordo Amoris proposed by St. Augustin and St. Thomas Aquinas to explain how they are handling immigration and deportations, and Catholics are divided. Headlines range from “JD Vance is Right about the ‘Ordo Amoris” to “The problem with JD Vance’s Theology of ‘ordo amoris.”

In its simple form and when applied politically, like the Greeks applied their own levels of loves to society, ordo amoris means “the order of love” and gives ethical justification for governments to prioritize first its own citizens, and then the rest of the world. At a human level it makes sense, and many Catholics agree. But at a spiritual level, it also contradicts what Jesus demands, that we love impartially, without limits, without borders, without limitations, and that is where the critique comes from other Catholics.

Jesus is commanding his followers to think first spiritually, to let go of our tendency to limit our love based on a priority of human relationships. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). When he asked someone to follow him, they said “Lord, let me go first and bury my father” to which Jesus responds, “follow me, and let the dead bury their dead” (Luke 9:60). When told that his mother and relatives where there for him, he said “who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said “here are my mother and my brothers.” At the last supper he will say “if you love me, you will keep my commandments” the first and most important which he had already revealed: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

The love of God is detached from personal interests even from preferential levels of love. At a human level it does not seem to make sense, but it is what Jesus has revealed is we need in order to be freed from the limitations of human love and the enmity that comes from that.

Take that spiritual law and apply it to every aspect of your life. Claim the power of God’s love especially over those who hurt you and do not let enmity and everything that comes from it: the desire for revenge, resentment and violence, overpower. Rather, turn the other cheek, left up your head and see one another as God sees them, equals, deserving of the very same saving love of God.

 + Fr. Carlos