The Gospel for today from St. Luke Chapter 6, Verses 31 to 36, is easy to understand but difficult to live. The opening sentence is: “Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.” The closing sentence is: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” In between those opening and closing sentences are many suggestions about how to love your enemies.

Rather than offer to you my own hesitant interpretation of this Gospel passage, let me turn to the third century theologian Origen of Alexandria and to St. Paul to see how they have interpreted this challenging advice from St. Luke.

In his collected sermons, On First Principles, Origen suggested that it is possible for us as human beings to discover the divine image within ourselves. Origen preached, and I quote: “We see the divine image [that is, the image of God] in its righteousness, temperance, courage, wisdom, discipline, and through the entire chorus of virtues that are present essentially in God. These can be in people through effort and the imitation of God,” wrote Origen. Is that really possible? Can we ordinary human beings imitate God?

St. Paul certainly thought we could imitate God. At the end of the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians and at the beginning of the fifth chapter St. Paul wrote: “Be kind to one another. . . “ Children, how can you be kind to each other? What do you do when you are kind to someone else?  . . . St. Paul continued: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also had forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us . . . .” So St. Paul sets before us a model—that we should be as “beloved children”—that is children who are deeply loved by their parents and others, because God first loves us before we learn to love Him.

When C. S. Lewis began to write his lovely little book, The Four Loves, he separated love into what he called “Gift-love and Need-love.” Now C. S. Lewis was quite sure—and rightly so—that “Divine love is Gift-love”—a gift to each of us. He wrote: “The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and [also] gives Himself to the world [and to us].”  However, Lewis thought that Need-love was, and I quote, “mere selfishness.” However, he soon realized that he was wrong, because, as Lewis phrased it, “we do in reality need one another. . . . We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, [especially if we are to know] ourselves.”  [End of Quote]. So there we are: precisely because we are human beings we can learn to cry out to God, who, as C. S. Lewis describes Him, has the ability and the desire to “untie things [within each of us] that are now knotted together and [to] tie up things [within us] that are still dangling loose.”

Often, the epistle and the gospel readings for the Divine Liturgy are a unity that fit together well. So it is today. In the book of Second Corinthians, Chapter 9, Verses 6 to 11 St. Paul urges us: “Each one must do as [they] have purposed in [their] heart[s]. . . . And God is able to make all grace abound to you.” In other words, if in our hearts our purpose in life is to find the divine image within ourselves, God will give us the grace to find that divine image. That is quite a promise from St. Paul. Our wish to find the divine image within us leads to God’s gift of grace—a love that gives us the strength to find the divine image within ourselves.

I conclude with the words of the fourth century bishop of Nyssa and brother of St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa: “It is not one thing to seek [God] and another to find [Him].” In other words, if we each have the courage to seek God’s will for our own lives, He gives us the grace to find the divine image within us.

And so we ascribe as is justly due all might, majesty, dominion, power and praise to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Father Emmanuel Kahn