By Richard Clifford, S.J.
Most of us has participated in a sport either as a child or as an adult. Inevitably, we must have had the experience of losing occasionally. We were taught to win with modesty and lose with grace. That word “grace” can sometimes be called “class.” “Class” means that when you win, you credit teammates even playing down your own role in the victory. If you are on the losing side, “class” dictates that you congratulate the winning team and their outstanding players. Put in other words, when you win you think of the losers and try to make things easier for them, and when you win you don’t boast or “rub it in” to the losers.
There is a kind of nobility that exists in sports at their best. It might seem that this “almost-noble” behavior, though unselfish and basically kind, has little to do with our Sunday church-going. I suggest that it is does, and in particular to this Sunday’s excerpt from Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain, Luke’s version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. It shows up as generosity in our relationships.
But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.. Do to others as you would have them do to you… if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?… And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?… love your enemies and do good to them, and… and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
Jesus’s last line sums up the whole: “For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” David’s behavior toward Saul in the cave (the first reading) illustrates well what Jesus is talking about. Saul was hunting down David in order to kill him. The table turns, and David has a chance to kill his mortal enemy Saul but refrains from doing so out of reverence for the office of king. The story was preserved down the ages because David did not do the conventional thing – kill his enemies in a culture where such a slaying would be readily understood. He refrained from doing the easy and conventional thing.
What is our lesson here? David once again comes helps us understand his successor Jesus’s teaching of generosity and restraint toward our enemies. It’s called “class, and there is more than a touch of the divine in it.
Richard Clifford, S.J. former President of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and Founding Dean of the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry