The first week of Lent ends with a word that does not wait: today. Moses presses it; the psalmist longs for it; Paul declares it “the acceptable time”; and Jesus turns it into the concrete demand of love. Lent is not a rehearsal. It is a covenant renewed in the present tense, and that covenant has a shape; enemy love; that reaches where our affections normally refuse to go.
The covenant spoken in the present tense
Deuteronomy speaks with mutuality and tenderness. “Today,” Moses says, you are making an agreement with the Lord: he will be your God; you will walk in his ways, “with all your heart and with all your soul.” And “today” the Lord pledges himself to you, making you “a people peculiarly his own,” a people sacred to him. The initiative is God’s, the response is ours, and the word binding both is today.
This covenant is not a contract for religious specialists but a way of belonging for ordinary people immersed in ordinary days. The psalm gives us the inner texture of such belonging: “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord… Oh, that I might be firm.” This is not legalism. It is desire, a heart aching to be steady. The commandments are not hurdles to clear but the grammar of love. To keep them “diligently” is to let God’s ways tutor our instincts, so that fidelity becomes as native as breath.
There is a temptation to treat covenant language as ceremonial: a recited pledge with little power. Scripture resists this by insisting on the immediacy of “today.” The covenant is enacted in the traffic of a Saturday, in the inbox, at the kitchen table, in the tension with a neighbor. The heart and soul demanded by Moses are not abstractions; they are the seat of choices we make when it is easier not to choose.
Loving beyond reciprocity
Into this covenantal “today,” Jesus places his most searching command: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” It is not a call to sentimentality. It is a summons to likeness: “that you may be children of your heavenly Father,” who spreads the gifts of sun and rain over “the bad and the good,” “the just and the unjust.”
Jesus exposes the limits of reciprocity. Loving those who love us back, greeting those in our circle; this is natural and good, but not distinctive. “Do not the tax collectors do the same?” In first-century terms, he points to groups commonly regarded as compromised or outside the covenant’s center. In our terms, he names the tendency in all of us to limit goodness to our own.
Enemy love is not passivity in the face of evil. The Christian tradition is clear: love can seek justice; forgiveness is not the same as trust; boundaries can be acts of charity when they protect the image of God; both in the wronged and in the wrongdoer. Yet even while pursuing justice, the disciple is commanded to refuse hatred’s acid. To pray for an enemy is to insist that their most truthful name is not “opponent” but “someone for whom Christ died.”
Who, concretely, are the “enemies” of our day? Not only persecutors in the narrow sense. Often they are the ones whose voices we mute, whose faces we roll our eyes at, whose party, parish faction, profession, or family line we have learned to disdain. In digital spaces, algorithms monetize antagonism; contempt feels like clarity. Jesus contradicts this with a weather report of grace: the Father’s sun and rain do not discriminate. Neither should the Christian’s intercession.
“Be perfect”: wholeness, not flawlessness
“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The word Jesus uses; teleios; speaks of maturity, completion, integrity. It answers Moses’ “all your heart and all your soul.” The perfection commanded is not an anxious pursuit of errorlessness. It is a wholeheartedness that refuses to fragment love, a steadiness that keeps covenant even when affection falters.
Perfection looks like this: the same heart that prays the psalm; “I will give you thanks with an upright heart”; also prays for a rival by name. The same hands that give alms to a friend extend help to a stranger who cannot repay. The same lips that “greet” family cross a room to greet the one avoided. In such acts, the disciple’s life becomes intelligible in the light of the Father’s indiscriminate generosity.
Now is the acceptable time
Paul’s word, brief as it is, belongs with Moses’ “today.” Lent will not wait on our moods; it hands us specific work. Consider practices that train the heart into enemy love:
- Pray by name for someone you struggle to regard with charity. Ask concretely for their good, not their defeat. Begin with one minute a day.
- Expand your greeting. At Mass, at work, on the street: intentionally acknowledge someone you habitually overlook or avoid.
- Fast from contempt. For a set period, abstain from sarcastic commentary about a person or group. If you fail, begin again; today.
- Seek a just step toward reconciliation where it is safe and prudent: a letter of apology, a commitment to mediation, a refusal to retaliate online.
- Give in ways that mirror “sun and rain.” Choose an act of generosity with no hope of return and no vetting of “worthiness”; a donation, a meal, a favor done quietly.
Such practices are small, but they tutor desire. They make possible what feels impossible by training the will and opening space for grace. They also expose how much we need mercy: attempts at enemy love reveal our poverty. That revelation is itself a gift of Lent. It can be brought, simply and honestly, to confession and to the altar.
Witness without superiority
Deuteronomy speaks of being raised “in praise and renown and glory,” a people “sacred to the Lord.” This is not a charter for superiority. It is a vocation to witness. When Christians love beyond reciprocity, they do not congratulate themselves; they point away from themselves. The credit belongs to the Father whose weather they imitate. In a fractured public square, such witness is intelligible even to those who do not share our creed. It has the quiet authority of a life that fits its words.
Becoming weather in a parched world
Our age is parched with grievance. The sun and rain of common grace are not clichés; they are the pattern of God’s daily patience. To be children of such a Father is to become, in our measure, a microclimate of mercy; steadier than preference, durable under strain.
Today; this very day; is the acceptable time. The covenant is spoken again. The psalm’s desire can be ours. And the hard command becomes, in Christ, a promise: what the Father commands, he also enables. May our love widen beyond reciprocity until our lives quietly resemble the weather by which God keeps even his enemies alive.