Overcome evil with good

(Rom 12,21)

Since evil always boils down to a lack of love, to the rejection of the love we owe to God and to our neighbor, the image and son of God, the ideal proposed to the Christian (and to every man who wants to act like a man) is to win evil with love. It is the fundamental meaning of the Sermon on the Mount. I talked about ideal.
Not in the sense of those who say that "love for others, for everyone, is a beautiful ideal, but in practice we must be realistic, à la guerre comme à la guerre, and not have too many scruples, because whoever becomes a sheep becomes , the lion eats it." No: we must practice love for our brothers, even for our enemies, with all our commitment, even though we know that we will never practice it to the end.

The meaning of Paul's lapidary expression, a compendium of the Sermon on the Mount, is thus indicated by a theologian, one of the most sensitive to today's reality judged in the light of the Gospel, Father Bernhard Häring (photo), (who experienced the barbarity of concentration camps): «Gather all the energies of love, gather all the energies of love so as not to be overcome by hatred, by evil... Non-violence can therefore be defined as the energies collected by love, nourished by faith, by hope, by charity... Only a great and humble love that hopes for everything can endure difficulties, opposition, defamation, without becoming embittered, without resentment for evil."

Does all this seem impossible to you? Does this seem absurd to you? Then also say whether the Gospel is absurd when it tells you that, twenty centuries ago, in Bethlehem, in humility and poverty, a child was born, Son of Mary and Son of God, to begin a journey that had thirty years to end up on a gallows. And why? Because God - Love made man - loved: he loved until the end, he loved me and sacrificed himself for me. Does all this seem absurd to you? Yet I believe it because Jesus said it and did it.

(excerpts from the volume edited by Sermig, Building with Peace, Edizioni Spe 1976)

Michele Pellegrino
NP December 2023