God's love is weird, lunacy, a little crazy

From photo by Elīna Arāja

If someone slaps your face, turn the other cheek, Jesus says, which is a weird thing to suggest. But it's weird only if you think Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and his subsequent comments are a kind of political platform, says Bishop Robert Barron.

Here’s a key now to reading the Sermon on the Mount: we can’t read it as just one sort of moral philosophy among many. So, everyone from Plato and Aristotle all the way up through Kant and Hegel and John Dewey has a moral philosophy—here’s our understanding of how humans ought to behave. Or they have a political philosophy—here’s the way we think society ought to be organized.

That’s true, again, from Plato through Karl Marx and everybody in between. And they say, well, here’s Jesus’ ethical teaching, here’s Jesus’ political philosophy. That’s precisely the wrong way to read it.

Barron then stresses the distinction that has to be made between all the crowd of moral philosophers and political theorists and Jesus in the moral challenges thrown down:   

[The] one thing you’ll notice is no one sounds like Jesus. [...] Jesus, in fact, sounds a little bit crazy. Name another moral philosopher who says, “I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” 

“Anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand over your cloak as well.” This sounds like lunacy. And then, to press it, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies.” 

Jesus "is not trading in ordinary moral thought here":

It’s something qualitatively different. What’s the key? [...] “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” 

What he’s interested in is divinization, that we become conformed to God’s way of being. The Church Fathers said “Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus”—God became man that we might become God. An extraordinary claim that goes right back to the earliest of the Church Fathers. The purpose of the Incarnation? God becomes one of us that human nature might be lifted up to share in God’s own life.

"Okay, if that’s the game," says Barron, then we need to know what God is like: 

But God is not a being in the world. God is the creative ground of all that exists. God is the unmoved mover. He’s the un-caused cause. That means his love is not predicated upon some cause extraneous to itself. I will love you because..., I will love you in the measure that..., I will love you under these conditions. Well, that’s how we creatures love each other, but that’s not how God operates.

God is love, we hear; that’s all he knows how to do. He doesn’t play the game of conditioned love, love parceled out, love in bits and pieces, my love if you love me. And we are meant to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.

"Turn the other cheek", "If someone demands that you carry their load for one mile, carry it for two miles". These are hard sayings because it is not what our instincts tell us. But, Barron stresses: 

It’s being said to us by the Son of God, who wants us not just to be just in some ordinary human sense. He wants us to be perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect, the one who makes his sun to shine on the good and the bad alike.

Unconditional love: go to the video of Bishop Barron's homily for his insights in full into what Christ is asking of us ‒ to love as God loves.

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