Reflection for Sunday – February 23, 2025
Readings: 1 Samuel 26: 2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23; 1 Corinthians 15: 45-49; Luke 6: 27-38
Preacher: Marilyn Catherine
“Love your enemy!”
I have enough trouble loving the one who is good to me. Little irritations push my buttons and send me off. Insignificant disparities offend my sensibilities. Too often I sit and stew, licking my scratches, silently scripting a drama where I am the star victim. Ugh. I can’t imagine how one crawls out of the abysmal pit that deep and long-lived wounds create.
In Jesus’ day, the person who strikes you on one cheek conveys the same meaning as the familiar expression a slap in the face—an act that offends or insults. Let’s give a closer look at the idiom. Literally, if someone slaps my cheek, my face turns away; I’m no longer seeing them. Likewise, in my responses, my only concern is for myself. I am the center of my world. But God’s world is a world of relationship.
What happens when I turn my cheek as Jesus proffers? Return to relationship.
I’ve opened myself up to the other. Possibly making myself vulnerable. But equally possibly allowing a face-to-face encounter that enables me to see myself in their eyes. Isn’t that the basis of compassion?
Betsie ten Boom is someone who modeled this message. Betsy and her sister Corrie lived in Holland during the Nazi occupation. They set up a network that helped Jews escape into hiding; they secreted 6 Jews in their own home. Eventually they were betrayed to the Gestapo, were arrested, and sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck.
While there they came to learn the identity of their betrayer. Corrie was filled with rage. In her biography (called The Hiding Place), she recalls, “I couldn’t even pray I was so wracked with the violence of my feelings about this man.” Betsie’s reaction was entirely different—a reaction that Corrie simply couldn’t understand: “Betsie, don’t you feel anything about him? Doesn’t it bother you?” Betsie replied, “Oh yes Corrie! Terribly! I’ve felt for him ever since I knew, and I pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How dreadfully he must be suffering!”
Corrie goes on to say, “I had the feeling that this sister of mine belonged somehow to a whole other order of beings.”
It’s true—this love Jesus calls us to feels unnatural.
The hate they witnessed during their imprisonment, the sheer cruelty of their persecutors is hard to fathom. Betsie died in Ravensbruck; Corrie survived. After the war she traveled tirelessly, always with her sister’s words urging her on: “If people can be taught to hate, then they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes. We must tell people, we must tell them what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”
After a church service in Munich, where Corrie had delivered Betsie’s message of forgiveness, a man came up to her reaching his hand out to shake hers. He told her how grateful he was for her message. His face beamed as he said, “to think, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” Instantly Corrie flashed back to the horror of Ravensbruck because she recognized this man. He had been a guard at Ravensbruck, one of her former SS jailers! Later Corrie would reflect, “How many times had I preached that message to others of the need to forgive? But in that moment I kept my hand locked at my side while the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me…I prayed, ‘Lord Jesus forgive me, help me to forgive him.’ But I could not. My smile, my hand, my heart were all frozen. ‘Jesus,’ I silently prayed, ‘I cannot forgive him. Give your forgiveness.’ And with that I took his hand. From my shoulder, along my arm, through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, and into my heart sprang a love for this man that almost overwhelmed me.”
When we look around today we see as Betsie and Corrie did—a world filled with fighting, covered with hatred, littered with broken relationships. Let us also remember as they did, “Jesus has promised to come to this world and make everything new.”
Let us remember and take hope in Betsie and Corrie’s words, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”
God’s mercy lifts us; Jesus only asks us to share what we receive.
She is active in her parish and founded the Creation Stewards Ministry there in 2007.
She is a writer and storyteller with "Women of the Well."In her opinion some of the best homilies come to us through the arts.
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