+ J. M. J. +
Homily Outline for the 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
We continue this week to hear from the Sermon of the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew, for the third Sunday in a row. Just to set the stage, remember that two weeks ago Jesus spoke of the need to be salt and light, and I focused on making that concrete in service to those in need, whether materially or spiritually. Then last week Jesus made it very clear that His Good News, the Gospel, is about the fulfillment of the Law, not the elimination of the Law. To summarize, following Christ necessarily involves concrete witness in our words and actions, as well as an ongoing and deep conversion whereby we fight sin both exteriorly, but also in our hearts.
I hope my words were challenging to you, I know they challenge me to live out of them, to follow my own advice so-to-speak! I pause for silence after each homily first because the Church tell me to do this in the rubrics, but I also do it for you, so if I’ve succeeded by God’s grace in saying something true, it can sink into your hearts. But I also pause so that I can allow the truth I’ve tried to express to sink into my own heart! I am just as much in need of conversion as you are, and that moment of silence helps me to embrace it. I also normally apologize to the Lord for my homily!
If the last two weeks are challenging, to serve those in need, to seek constant and interior conversion, then this week’s serving of the Gospel ups the ante considerably! Jesus’ teaching here would have gone considerably against the common Jewish understanding, and it goes against the deep structure of our fallen human nature. A desire for justice and fairness is a gift from God, but our typical pattern of fighting fire with fire is not!
Jesus begins with the so-called lex talionis: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This phrase is a direct quotation of from Exodus and Leviticus. It’s often held up as a barbaric practice, but in fact it’s a major improvement on actual human behavior… think of blood feuds or vendettas or mafia and drug cartel behavior, where the violence continually escalates. Think of the Cold War arms race, where each round meant that Soviets and Americans were facing each other with ever greater capacity to destroy. Mired in sin, if someone insults us we punch them in the face, they take out a gun and shoot back, and then our family rapes and burns their entire village. This is the human pattern under the reign of sin, and requiring that retaliation be similar in kind and scale is a major step in the right direction. However, it’s not the whole journey… and this is where once again Jesus’ intensifies the call of the God to us. The Jews were called to love the members of their own tribe, other Jews, and to treat Gentiles with justice. The Law limited them to fair and balanced retaliation. As Christians, we are called to forgiveness, and even to generosity towards those who harm us. We are called not merely to reject destroying our enemies, but we are called to love them.
To love our enemies… we’ve all heard the phrase many times, but if we’re honest, have we ever even tried? Remember… love is to choose the good of the other. It’s not primarily or essentially feeling warm and fuzzy towards them. At times we feel warm tenderness and affection for those we love, but not all the time. If loving our enemies meant feeling warm and fuzzy towards them, it would be an irrational and impossible teaching, but love is most fundamentally a choice, not only a feeling. With God’s grace we can choose to love our enemies, we can choose to seek their good.
Just pause and call to mind your enemies, or those you struggle to love: is it your spouse, your parent, a sibling, or a child? Is it a co-worker or your boss or your roommate? Is it the professor who gave you a failing grade or the student who ignores you and treats you with disrespect? Is it connected to a wound buried deep in the past, or from something that happened yesterday? Not infrequently we bury hurt and anger and bitterness deep in our hearts and try to pretend it’s not there… but that venom hurts us first and most of all. Holding onto a grudge, holding onto anger…. it’s like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies!
Concretely, how do we follow this call from our Lord, this teaching that He modeled for us perfectly on the Cross? First, ask for God’s help… “Lord, help me to want to forgive… fill in the blank.” If we can ask for God’s grace we have begun the journey. Forgiving and loving doesn’t mean that what happened wasn’t bad, or that we want it to happen again. It doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten or that the wound is perfectly healed. Forgiving a thief doesn’t necessarily mean we leave the door unlocked, and loving someone who has hurt us doesn’t necessarily mean we step back into the place where we were hurt. But it does mean beginning to give God our hurt and pain and anger, and it does mean praying for the person, the enemy, who has hurt us, and it does mean trusting that God can do in us that which we cannot accomplish alone.
St. Paul tells us that we are temples of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in us. Will we open all the doors, all the cupboards, all the nooks and crannies in our hearts to the Holy Spirit? As we receive Jesus’ Body and Blood, poured out on the Cross from which He forgave His executioners… will we allow His saving Blood to flood into those places? If we can make this choice today, and then again tomorrow, truly God’s light will shine in us and through us! In our silence now, let us ask God for the courage to welcome Him into all the places that have been boarded up.
+ A. M. D. G. +
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