Excerpts from Bishop Barron – WordOnFire.org
The three classical spiritual practices that the Church urges us to embrace during Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I would strongly encourage every one of my readers to follow this recommendation, perhaps intensifying each one of the three during the holy season. But there is another Lenten discipline that I would like to put forward, inspired very much by the Gospel readings this week: forgiving an enemy.
There is enough anger in the Catholic community to light up the eastern seaboard for a year. I say this not to pick on Catholics in particular; I would say it of any group of human beings. We are—all of us—sitting on a lot of unresolved rage. Thomas Aquinas defines the deadly sin of anger in his typically pithy manner as an irrational or excessive desire for revenge. Every one of us has been hurt by someone else, aggressed, unjustly harmed, insulted, perhaps to an extreme degree. And so, naturally enough, we harbor a desire to respond in kind. Now, there is such a thing as justified anger, which is nothing but a passion to right wrongs. Think of the “anger” displayed by Jesus as he cleansed the temple or by Martin Luther King as he led the civil rights movement. That righteous indignation is to be praised. But many of us, let’s be honest, cultivate an excessive, unreasonable passion to get back at those who have harmed us. We spend an extraordinary amount of time fantasizing about what we might say and do to our enemies if we ever had the opportunity or the requisite power. This is what Thomas Aquinas means by the “deadly sin” of anger.
And this is precisely what Jesus is urging us to extricate from our souls precisely through the admittedly wrenching act of forgiving our enemies. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord teaches, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder. . . .’ But I say to you, ‘that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council. . . .’ So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there. . . . First be reconciled to your brother or sister.” And in what constitutes, in my judgment, the rhetorical and spiritual highpoint of the Sermon, Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies.” This teaching makes no sense unless we are assuming that we have real enemies—that is to say, people who have unfairly and aggressively harmed us. But the Lord is summoning us beyond the desire for revenge, even beyond the strict justice of the lex talionis, the “eye for an eye” principle. He is insisting that we love those who have made us angry, that we desire their good.