Luke 6:35-36

4 th. The model and source of the charity which Jesus has just depicted: Luke 6:35 b and 36. “ And your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for He is kind to the unthankful and to the evil. 36. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. ”

Having referred to the love which His disciples are to surpass, that of man by nature a sinner, Jesus shows them what they must aspire to reach, that divine love which is the source of all gratuitous and disinterested love. The promise of a reward is no contradiction to the perfect disinterestedness which Jesus has just made the essential characteristic of love. And, in fact, the reward is not a payment of a nature foreign to the feeling rewarded, the prize of merit; it is the feeling itself brought to perfection, the full participation in the life and glory of God, who is love! Καί, and in fact. This disinterested love, whereby we become like God, raises us to the glorious condition of His sons and heirs, like Jesus Himself. The seventh beatitude in Matthew, “ Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” is probably a general maxim taken from this saying.

If the ungrateful and the wicked are the object of divine love, it is because this love is compassionate (οἰκτίρμων, Luke 6:36). In the wicked man God sees the unhappy man. Matthew 5:45 gives this same idea in an entirely different form: “ For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. ” How could these two forms have been taken from the same document? If Luke had known this fine saying in Matthew, would he have suppressed it? Matthew concludes this train of thought by a general maxim similar to that in Luke 5:36: “ Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect. ” These two different forms correspond exactly with the difference in the body of the discourse in the two evangelists. Matthew speaks of the inward righteousness, the perfection (to which one attains through charity); Luke, of charity (the essential element of perfection; comp. Col 3:14).