Everyone sees the beauty of the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel. The Golden Rule (Luke 6:31) – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – is magnificent, but when Jesus gets down to specifics, we start to part company with him. He would have us love our enemies and give ourselves in all charity to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, lend with no expectation of receiving back, and actively cooperate with those who physically assault us. Who can possibly live this way?

No one. Or at least, none of us. No matter how hard we try to interpret these words of Jesus so as to turn them into something practical, something we can follow, they remain as rough and unyielding as the wood of the cross. They may well apply to him, but when he tries to make them apply to us, we know in our bones that he has made a mistake. He cannot be talking about us; he must be talking about some other very different kind of human being.

And that is exactly what he is doing. He is not talking about us as we are before his grace is poured out upon us, but rather as we are and as we will be when his grace has transformed us and remade us according to the pattern that he himself is. The Son of God is sent to be the Saviour of the world, which means that by him all things will be made new, and ourselves first of all and most of all. It is precisely this transformation in Christ that the apostle Paul alludes to in today’s epistle.

Near the end of his First Letter to the Corinthians Saint Paul draws a contrast between the first Adam and the last Adam, that is, Christ. The first Adam is a living soul, but is very much of earth, taken from the dust and destined to dissolve back into dust. The last Adam, Christ, is of heaven and is a life-giving spirit. And we, what are we? Paul tells us at the end of the passage: ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of earth, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.’ We were made in the image and likeness of God, an image marred and distorted by our own sinfulness and selfishness. We shall be remade in the image of Jesus, who is himself the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation and the firstborn from the dead. We who have borne the image of the earthly man shall also bear the image of the heavenly man. The first Adam is our origin; the last Adam, Christ, is our destiny.

With the Incarnation and the paschal mystery of the Son of God our destiny is now come upon us. It has not, obviously, reached its glorious conclusion, and our way upon earth is still very much a way of the cross. And yet we know where this all ends, and so we know where we are – it is a way of the cross that ends as it did for Jesus, going through the doors of death into the glory of the Resurrection, which is the seed and sign of the new creation, his utter victory over sin and death. The dawn is breaking and even now we are being guided by its light.

Some of us are more radiant with that light than others. In the great saints we catch a glimpse of that splendor of a world redeemed and a humanity transformed. In an Anthony of Egypt and a Francis of Assisi, in an Edith Stein and a Mother Teresa of Calcutta we see lives lived pretty much as Jesus has laid out in today’s Gospel, and so we know that this is not a dream that vanishes on waking, but is as real as anything can be and more real than most of things that absorb our attention in the course of a normal day.

And so, we are not discouraged by the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel. We know, or have heard of, some of our brothers and sisters in Christ who have conducted themselves exactly as he has spelled out in today’s reading, and we know that they did not do it by their own power or on their own steam. They did it by his grace and his power, which is the same way that we will do it when our moment comes, however near or far off that moment is. To meditate on today’s Gospel is not to dream the impossible dream; it is to catch a glimpse of a world redeemed and of ourselves transformed; it is to behold even now the beauty of the second and last Adam, whose image we shall bear and who even now is shaping us and our ways.