Loving Enemies and Doctors, Praying for Persecutors and Surgeons

The title of this post is alarming, but so is Christ’s teaching in today’s Gospel.  Enemies and persecutors do not exactly rouse in one’s heart the natural affections which support what we are tempted to call love.  But even the pagan philosopher Aristotle knew that the love constituting true friendship is not ultimately based on pleasure or utility---on agreeable feelings evoked or benefits given by another---but rather by one’s own effective willing of the other’s perfective good.  Thus one is not entirely shocked when immediately after essentially proposing that we are to seek what is good for our enemies and persecutors, the Lord Jesus concludes with the lapidary admonition:  “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

           

From my first visit to a doctor, I have been amazed that we seek out (and generously compensate) these people who cause us discomfort and, so often, temporary harm.  I am not speaking here about the incompetence of malpractice but of the obvious fact that oftentimes the surgeon’s knife needs to cut in order to heal.

In my orthodontic adventures, it has been an ongoing marvel to experience the painful constriction of my teeth and the daily shredding and callousing of the epithelial tissue of my mouth by ordinary braces.  When complications emerged with my jaw, there were times in which its “therapeutic” manipulation over the course of minutes left me debilitated for days.  And all of this was before the surgery, with its cutting into my lower abdomen on the fat-finding expedition for the graft to be injected into my jaw joints through the (careful!) invasion and arthroscopic burrowing into each side of my head after I had been rendered unconscious.  I shall not speak of the catheterization and its (temporary, thank the Lord) aftereffects.  Yesterday’s blog already detailed the travails of post-operative medication side-effects and continuous splint wearing (leaving me unable to sing, speak clearly or for long, lick my lips or even an envelope, blow out a candle, etc.).  AND ALL OF THIS WAS DONE BY GOOD PEOPLE USING EXCELLENT MEDICAL PROTOCOLS ENTIRELY DIRECTED AT MY ULTIMATE GOOD!!!

I go into such detail because this whole process has allowed me to contemplate better the deceptively straight-forward and obvious fact of exactly how Christ chose to save us:  He entrusted Himself to evil men, who would use evil means, to do evil things to His Body and Spirit, for purposes that were from the beginning and in the end evil.  In precisely this surgical operation of our Divine Physician, He undergoes in His Passion and Death the revelation of the depth of the Divine Benevolence.

Thus before Christ’s teaching on love of enemies is some abstract and impossible moral exhortation, it is an autobiographical revelation of His Person.  The Lord Jesus is describing through the very trajectory of His mission the surgical protocol for the operation of His Incarnate Love for the world’s salvation.  Ordinary doctors and surgeons show us that even relatively simple therapeutic interventions require a measure of pain and patience unto the shedding of some tears and blood.  These imperfect but talented and good-willed practitioners of the healing arts can point the way to the only One whose love reaches its apogee not in mere resuscitation and restoration of the body back to “normal” but in its glorious Resurrection unto life eternal.  From this grace of our miraculous recovery by Christ, we can undertake with confidence our day to day perfective therapy of extending His love to the apparently unlovable---all for the life of the world.