Vessel, Enemies and Matthew's word of healing.

MATTHEW 5 : 38-48

This passage is full of familiarity, and depth that is asking a lot from us. I am left reflecting on a few different points that are raised from this passage. The notion that we are all a vessel of transforming love - what an image. Even an image of been a vessel is powerful, add the Lord unconditional love to give to others.. wow… 

Yet for this blog post, that continues the development of the desert day writing, I want to focus on only one bit of the text 

“But I say, “Love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!”Matthew 5:44

Reading these words, I felt confident that I knew what the scripture was telling me. 

How many of us have heard His words, “Love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you”? 

AND I DO, I thought smugly. I pray for the people out there who hurt others, who cause pain with their words, actions and causes unjust within peoples hearts and lives. I pray for those I witness within daily life, who cause hurt towards others and often towards myself at times. 

Then, I stumbled… there is more to this than a surface level of praying for others. 

More to this than what I have been gifted to see so far.

A challenge.

To openly pray for those who personally I do not get along with. The very thought makes me cringe at the very self ownership required in my actions and words to the very fact, that there are people that I don’t get along, personal enimies. My heart is so pulled by the words and my own obvious discomfort that takes more time praying with the words in Matthew 5:38-48 mean, in my own humanity confronting this passage.

Here’s the beautiful thing about prayer, though - its for us - you and me! It’s not for guilting ourselves into returning to a dysfunctional relationship and being a doormat for Jesus. It’s not for beating ourselves up over what we did wrong. Prayer and one can even say actions of repentance help guide us to healing. Maybe the healing happens on both ends - ours and our ‘enemy’s’. Maybe its just in our own heart. The passage says to love and pray for our enemies “that you may be children of your Father in heaven”, He is our Father who forgives and heals us and reconciles us to Him! 

Loving your enemies isn’t simply about praying from afar - it is also for those who have or have had, an intensely role in our lives. That’s part of Jesus words in Matthew 5:44. Through love and prayer comes healing from resentment, bitterness, anger. We are able to come closer to Christ’s command to “be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”(v.48) as we confess the hardness in our own hearts to the One who understands perfect love. 

Bring me full circle to the start of my thoughts pattern - 

I am like a broken vessel -  Psalm 31:12

Through the cumulative roundedness, comes the whisper, 

“You are my beloved. My Broken Beloved. My Beloved Broken” 

Its all okay. 

This brokenness. This cracked life. This damaged family. Yes, we are broken, but not discarded; cracked, but not rejected; damaged, but not junk. We are the broken. And we are, incomprehensibly, unfathomably, the beloved. 

The two are very interconnected, forgiveness, loving, praying, personal enemies or rather broken brothers and sisters. 

Sitting in mass, I am reminded of this powerful hand of the Lord, he does not expect perfection as mention above, nor does he believe in trash, this is a foreign concept in the Lord kingdom. 

He takes up His own body and breaks it for the broken: “This is my body broken for you” (1Cor.11:24) 

His crushing heals us; by His wounds we are healed.  - what a gift this lenten period holds for us. 

Our crushing releases His oil out upon a hurting world; by our wounds we are used… and find our own wholeness. 

SO I accept it, embrace it; we are the broken. And yet we are gathered and beloved, His special possession, the broken ones to whom He draws near. 

How does one blossom in a place of brokenness? As He does. Bend down to gather up the broken. Draw close our fractured beloved ones. Forsake fixing. Love the wounded, kin of our own brokenness, the fruit of the fallen, skinned world. 

He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave. And so this is the pattern for life, taken after the Lords; I know where to turn, to take, chosen, and called. Yes, I am the beloved, openly soaking in His blessings showered upon me. Yet I accept the life of broken, cracked. So I give, pouring out through the fractures, for I know, painfully so, what it is to be broken. 

Which will all sound very familiar to you… 

I reach for a cup of tea, on the table bathed in midday light. There is healing in this brokenness.