St Paul was a selfless man. The extent of his selflessness is apparent in today's first reading. Although Paul knows that it is not wrong in itself to eat meat offered to idols, he declared that "he would never eat meat again" if by so doing, he would be the unwitting cause of a less well informed fellow Christian sinning. His love for his fellow men and women was so great that he became a person for others. In a certain sense he had "died to himself." He didn't exist any more as an "I".

Such detachment from self, if only we could acquire it would make it unlikely that we would have "enemies". Please note the inverted commas! In an amusing American novel a reputed former Mafia boss is on his death bed. He has repented and is being attended by a priest. "Have you forgiven your enemies?" asked the priest. "I have no enemies," came the answer. "You have no enemies" echoed the priest with more than a hint of a question mark in his voice. "They are all dead" said the old man with perhaps a flash of his old unreformed self.

If we did everything that Jesus wants us to do in today's Gospel, we would have reached the heights of self forgetfulness even beyond the heights that St Paul reached. The self, the "I" would have ceased to exist. We couldn't have enemies. Is this an absurdly unrealistic goal? Perhaps not completely.