Year A: 12^th Sunday of OT
Matthew 5:38-42

Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries

Reflection on this passage evoke a lot of inner conflicts in me. When Jesus says, “Do not resist an evildoer,” “turn the other cheek,” “give your coat as well,” “go the second mile,” I do not feel comforted. I feel exposed. This is Matthew chapter five, the same chapter that blesses the poor and the meek, but here it stops blessing and starts demanding. And what it demands is the dismantling of every self-protective reflex I own. The law of “eye for eye” at least made sense to my body. It was fair. It was a leash on vengeance, yes, but still a leash I could hold. Jesus cuts the leash entirely. He asks me to absorb injury without returning it, to stand there with an open hand while the world slaps, sues, and steals. My first reaction is not awe. It is a quiet, furious no.

I know where that no lives. It lives in my stomach. Someone wrongs me—a lie, a betrayal, a casual cruelty—and before I can think, my gut clenches. A hot, metallic taste rises in my throat. My jaw locks. This is not sin. This is my ancient inheritance: the survival reflex of every creature that ever had to protect itself. Jesus is asking me to override that reflex, not once but as a way of life. And the bitter truth is that when I try, my stomach does not thank me. It rebels. It floods me with nausea, with the raw conviction that I am being a coward, that I am letting injustice win. That taste in my mouth is the ego’s death rattle. It is the price of refusing to hand the hot coal of my anger to someone else.

The psychospiritual work of this transition is not about feeling holy. It is about learning to stay in the fire. When I turn the other cheek internally—when I breathe instead of striking back, when I say nothing instead of delivering the cutting word—I am not being passive. I am doing the most active work there is: sitting in my own righteous anger without throwing it. I name the clench in my stomach: this is my need for justice, my fear of being nothing. And I ask one small question: Do I have to act from this place? Not acting is a victory, even if my gut screams otherwise. Every time I refrain, I expand my window of tolerance. The bitterness does not vanish. But I stop being ruled by it.

Yet Jesus does not leave me here. The refusal to retaliate is not the destination. In the very next verses of Matthew five, he says: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That is a different order of impossibility. I have learned, through painful practice, to hold back my fist. I have even learned to feel a cold pity for the one who hurt me. But love? The word lands like a stone in my chest. To love the person who mocked me, who used me, who acted as if my humanity did not matter—this is not a feeling I can manufacture. My stomach, which had begun to settle after the work of restraint, clenches again. Love means willing their good. Love means praying for them, not the distant “Lord forgive them” but the intimate prayer that longs for their healing even as I remember their harm. The cost of this transition is staggering. I must give up the last scrap of my wounded ego’s righteousness. I can no longer be the virtuous one who merely refrained from revenge. I must become someone who wants my enemy to live.

And here I finally understand that I cannot do this alone. Willpower can clench my jaw and keep my mouth shut. Willpower can force me to turn the other cheek out of sheer obedience. But willpower cannot produce love. Love for an enemy is beyond my natural capacity. I can no more summon it than I can lift myself by my own collar. This is where grace enters. Grace is not a gentle boost to my existing efforts. It is the invasion of a power not my own. Grace is the quiet, unearned movement within me that begins to see my enemy not as a monster but as a broken mirror of my own woundedness. Grace softens the knot in my stomach when every fibre of my being wants to keep it tight. Grace whispers, They are also my child, and for one impossible moment, I believe it.

The psychospiritual reality is that the transition from retaliation to love requires a rewiring I cannot accomplish by self-discipline alone. I can practice non-reaction. I can build neural pathways of restraint. But the final metamorphosis—the actual replacement of resentment with benevolence—is a gift. I must receive it like rain: I cannot make it fall, but I can stop running from it. I can pray the prayer I do not feel: Lord, give me love for this person. I can show up to the interior work even when my heart is dry. And slowly, over years and tears, grace does what effort could not. It does not remove the memory of the wound. It does not make the bitterness disappear. But it places that bitterness within a larger field of compassion—first for myself, then, astonishingly, for the one who harmed me.

The cost remains. I still feel the clench in my stomach when I remember. I still taste the metal of injustice when I pray for my enemy. But now I recognize that taste not as a failure, but as the very place where grace is needed most. Grace does not bypass my gut. It enters through it. The bitter feeling becomes the altar where I stop trying to be strong and finally admit that I need something beyond myself. That admission is the door. On the other side is not heroic love. It is a quiet, fragile willingness to wish my enemy well. That small, impossible willingness is the work of grace. It is also, Jesus says, the perfection of the Father, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good. I am not there yet. But I no longer run from the bitterness. I let it teach me my need. And grace meets me there, every time.