The true test of Christianity

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

I BELIEVE it’s when we manage to love our enemies that we can truly say we are real Christians. That’s because we can only do that when we truly identify ourselves with Christ.

It definitely is an identification that does not take place on the natural level alone but mainly in the supernatural ways of Christ who is God in the first place who became man to enable us to attain our true dignity as children of God, created in his image and likeness.

Christ said this very clearly. “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them,” Christ said. Then he proceeded by saying: “But rather, love your enemies…and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as also your Father is merciful.” (Lk 6,32.35)

To be able to love our enemies can only be an effect of grace. It can only take place when we truly are identified with Christ. We simply cannot rely on our human powers alone. Our human powers have to be animated by the very grace of God.

Thus, when we find ourselves in situations where we have to contend with some enemies or conflicts, let’s remember that the first thing to do is to go to Christ, to ask for grace, to make our identification with him even tighter.

This obviously will require a lot of virtues—humility, patience, magnanimity, fortitude, to mention a few. We have to learn how to discipline our emotions and passions, and to be most careful with what we say. We have to be quick to purify our thoughts and intentions whenever some negative elements enter into them.

Let’s remember that the greatest evil and the worst injustice have already been committed, and that is the killing of Christ by man. But such evil and injustice did not elicit another evil reaction from Christ. On the contrary, he offered forgiveness. We do not correct a wrong with another wrong. As one saint would put it, we have to drown evil with an abundance of good.

Everytime we are confronted with this challenge of loving our enemies, we are actually being invited to become more and more like Christ. We are given an opportunity to enter into the supernatural life, nature and ways of God that are also meant for us since we are God’s image and likeness.

This is the challenge we have to face—how to free ourselves from the controlling grip of our senses and reasoning, of our own human consensus and estimations of things, and to let ourselves be guided by the mysterious ways of our faith, full of wisdom and charity albeit always accompanied by sacrifices.

This would require nothing less than God’s grace which we can always safely presume is given to us freely and abundantly. What we have to demand on ourselves is a lot of humility, of simplicity and obedience. Pride makes us deaf and blind, insensitive to the ways of God, and makes us our own guide, instead of God.

To be sure, if we follow this commandment, we would be loving God and others the way Christ himself has loved his Father and all of us. It’s a love that is totally inclusive on the part of the lover, though it may be rejected by the beloved.

It’s a love that would convert and transform us into another Christ, if not Christ himself (alter Christus, ipse Christus), for love, the real love that comes from God, has that power of making the lover united and identified with the beloved.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com