Tolerance and Love

“When Jesus spoke about loving one’s enemies, he used a fairly provocative statement that was intended to arouse consciences lulled by stereotypically repeated clichés and half-truths about people who are ‘different’ and to unsettle our seeming certainties about who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are, how we are and they are, what we are supposed to think about ‘foreigners,’ and how we are to treat them. If we have felt the need to replace Jesus’s enacting requirement with the softer word tolerance, doesn’t that indicate that we’re still running away from what Jesus expects from his followers?”

– Tomáš Halík, I Want You to Be