Yes, the hard reality

Today I came across this excellent, because ultimately challenging, testimony by Fr Stephen at his blog Glory to God for All Things. I am just going to provide a short excerpt here, to whet your appetite but not to spoil your supper, because what he writes in his essay The Hard Reality of the Kingdom of God is what we need to hear right now at this moment in history. If you've visited my blog and read what I write about, or if you're familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his book The Cost of Discipleship, you will know that I am in complete, and helpless, agreement with Fr Stephen. Complete, because it is the truth no matter how you cut it, and helpless, because though I agree with it, I too cannot always practice it. In fact, on my own power I can practice it not at all. Christ has a way of asking us for impossible things, but if we will just trust Him and do them, He will always provide the means to accomplish them. Sometimes, what He asks seems just too fearful, and no amount of faith, if He doesn't provide the grace first, will let us abandon ourselves to the word of His command. I see I've already written far too much, when I only wanted to bring your attention to a better word than mine. Well, at last, hear it is…

There are many things that bring us up against the hard reality of the Kingdom of God. The Gospel given to us by Christ, the verbal icon of the Kingdom, often gives us commands or parables that run radically counter to instinct (as we experience it) and, not infrequently, against reason (or so it seems).

No commandment in the teachings of Christ fits this description better than “forgive your enemies.” Our instinct is generally always to avoid and protect ourselves from our enemies, and, in extreme cases, to kill them or imprison them if possible. Again, this seems entirely reasonable for enemies may indeed be genuinely serving the cause of evil, and present a danger (physical, moral, etc.) to those around them.
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Years (centuries) of scholastic torment have rendered the commandments of Christ of little effect, transforming them into virtual rabbinic arguments about the rightness and wrongness of certain actions. Their dynamic in the role of salvation is completely lost (particularly where salvation itself is seen through a forensic lens). Salvation is to be conformed to the image of Christ – a work of grace – a gift from God. However the distortion of that image becomes an enemy of grace and stumbling block to salvation.

And so we come back to our salvation and the commandments of Christ. It is a difficult thing to ponder and yet we must – who are my enemies that I should love? Why does my heart hate them so? Why do I rejoice at their downfall and not weep for the sins of another human being – who is – by definition – my brother?

… Read it all here.