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Since I have joined the congregation, I sometimes find principles of the spiritual journey that looks similar but slightly different from the one of the secular world. "The meaning of the enemy" is one of them.
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While I was in the last year of my university and the first several years at my company, I read many self-development books. Those books said one of the values which people who are just about to begin their career have to keep in their mind is " wherever you go, the first thing you have to do is figuring out who are your enemies." so that we can find who are your friends.
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In the secular world, the meaning of the enemy is simply someone who gives you harm or threatens your benefit. But While I was meditating today's Gospel, I found our religious meaning of the enemy is a little different from that of the secular world.
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This is the news article that I read this morning guided my meditation.
One Professor doctor saw a young new doctor at the hospital was watching the x-ray picture of the one-year-old baby over and over again.
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He went to him and shouted at him. “Hey, if you have time to watch that picture of baby, you’d better go to watch the picture of that elder person who got a car accident!”
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Then the new young doctor told him, “ Professor this is weird. This baby came here three times for the last month, to this emergency room!” Then the professor thought “Oh my gosh, he’s better than me. I have been in Prejudice.” Then after determined that the picture together they decided to report to the police.
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When the police came to the emergency room and asked several questions to the father. The father got really upset and shouted out "How dare you to say like that to me? I am this baby’s father, and I’m the one who scared of the most when my baby was got injured.”
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The article didn’t say how this ended up with. But I understood the father’s feeling and I thought the doctors went too far.
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But when I read the comments underneath the article I found a reversal in the story. There are many parents who have similar experiences. They say they also got angry at first, but later they found out that they feel thankful to the doctors. Because they could understand that reason the doctors did that because they were really worried about their babies.
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Sometimes we find out later that things or person that gave us a hard time were actually helping us.
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Going back to the beginning, the enemy in the secular word It’s just someone who is hurting or threatening us. But I found that the meaning of enemy in the spiritual world is including someone I don’t want to listen to when I got into the wrong direction.
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Just like we read Ahab's story from the 1st Reading today.”
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Before loving our enemy, we have to know who is our enemy. This is the same principle that I learned from the secular world. But the proposal is different. In the secular world, we have to know our enemy to protect ourselves. But in our spiritual journey, we have to know our enemy to know if I am getting into the wrong direction.
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If we look carefully who we think our enemy is and listen carefully to things that our enemy is talking to us, we might find out where we are going to or if we are going wrong.
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After checking out our direction, then we might truly be able to love our enemy. Amen.
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