7th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Feb. 23, 2014
Matt 5: 38-48
Scouting NYLT, Putnam Valley, N.Y.
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison
“You
have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’” (Matt
5: 38).
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| The Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch |
Our
gospel reading today picks up where last week’s left off. We’ve been reading from Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount for 3 weeks and will have 1 more week of it before Lent interrupts the
sequence. (Yes, gang, Ash Wednesday is
almost upon us!)
Last
week and this week Jesus is teaching us how our observance of God’s law must go
beyond the bare minimum of observance.
You may remember that last week he said, “Unless your holiness surpasses
that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven”
(5:20). The scribes and Pharisees,
generally speaking, were pious men, very devoted to keeping the Law of
Moses—they were the religious conservatives and traditionalists of 1st-century
Judaism. But Jesus calls his disciples
to go deeper, to be more intense in our love of God and therefore our love of
neighbor. He calls us, in the last words
of today’s gospel, to “be perfect” like our heavenly Father (5:48).
Now,
obviously, we aren’t God. We aren’t
morally perfect. The word Jesus uses in St.
Matthew’s Greek (τέλειοι) has the idea of completeness or wholeness. If our observance of God’s law, if our
discipleship of Jesus, is to be complete, we have to strive to act toward other
people the way God does.
And
how does God treat people—which means you and me and everyone? With even-handed
mercy, with infinite patience. Yes,
there is the possibility of damnation; last week Jesus made references to
Gehenna. But final judgment belongs to
God. In this life we have Jesus’
teachings about patience in the face of persecution, about loving our enemies.
In
the OT God set limits on the retribution that the Jews might seek, especially
in a society less organized than ours, legally speaking; a society in which
individuals often had to execute justice on their enemies or on criminals,
somewhat like we imagine the Old West to have been in the absence of Wyatt Earp
or John Wayne. Thus the Book of
Leviticus says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (24:20); you could
get even, but no more than that. If
someone knocked out 1 of your teeth, you couldn’t break 3 of his.
When
we look at the Middle East today—from Libya eastward to Pakistan—and other
places like the Central African Republic and South Sudan, we see cycles of
vengeance. That vengeance is often
inflicted not merely on the perpetrators of some wrong—stolen cattle, an
offense to someone’s honor, an allegation of political corruption, a physical
injury, an act of terrorism—but even on completely innocent people who happen
to belong to the wrong tribe, the wrong nationality, the wrong religion. It goes far beyond the limits of the Law of
Moses, which allows no more than an eye for an eye, allows an “evening-up” only
from the actual perpetrator, not from his son, his cousin, the family next
door.
Jesus
makes a bigger demand on us: “Offer no
resistance to one who is evil” (5:39).
Then he gives several examples:
unjust assault, the requisitioning of one’s goods, forced labor imposed
by the Roman military authorities.
In
commanding us not to resist evil, Jesus is commanding us to be non-violent, to
accept injury and wrongdoing to ourselves rather than harm someone else. Being non-violent runs counter to our
instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, even of justice. Certainly we have a natural right to protect
ourselves from assault or robbery and to defend ourselves against lawsuits. Jesus urges us not to exercise that right, in
effect to imitate himself in his passion and death. Very few Christians are actually willing and
able to do that. (My blood boils and my
voice gets louder just as fast as anyone else’s, and if you punch me I’m likely
to punch you back.)
Yet
history does show us that non-violence can be powerful. Remember Gandhi’s campaign for Indian
independence and MLK’s campaign for civil rights. Remember also that the civil rights movement
was explicitly rooted in the Bible as much as in our country’s foundational
documents. (Aside: the civil rights movement as it has evolved
today, demanding “abortion rights” and “gay rights,” rejects both the Bible and
biological facts; it has become “the wisdom of this world” that is “foolishness
in the eyes of God,” as St. Paul says today [1 Cor 3:18].)
Matthew’s
gospel was addressed to Christians who were a tiny, oppressed minority within
the Roman Empire. Jesus’ words, then,
speak to the individual behavior of disciples in relation to their neighbors
and civil and religious authorities. “Turning
the other cheek” is something we can do individually. Settling an unjust lawsuit is something we
can do. “Giving to one who asks of you”
is something we can do.
But
what are Christians to do when they are no longer a tiny, oppressed minority
but in fact have become the civil and religious authorities? Can a 21st-century police officer or governor
“offer no resistance to one who is evil”?
Can a disciple of Jesus serve in the armed forces and still “love his
enemies”? How does the government
provide for the needy in a fiscally responsible manner? Being a disciple of Jesus has gotten a lot
more complicated since 30 A.D.!
Christians
are now involved in civil government with responsibility for protecting the
public welfare: people’s lives,
property, and liberty. Would it be right
for a public official to turn the other cheek for the entire city or country, while
criminals or armies rampage everywhere, looting, raping, burning, and
killing? Or does love for one’s neighbor
require Christians to defend people, even with force if necessary? 20 years ago, Europe and the U.S. watched a
million people be slaughtered in Rwanda, and tens of thousands more in Bosnia
because, supposedly, those acts of “ethnic cleansing” didn’t concern us.
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| Rwanda: Deep gashes delivered by the killers are visible in the skulls that fill one room at the Murambi School |
For 3 years we’ve been watching the slaughter
of 130,000 Syrians. Do we have a
responsibility to intervene, or is it OK to “turn our back on” people in need
(cf. Matt 5:42)? What does loving our
neighbor mean for a world power that is also a democratic society?
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| St. Augustine Basilica of Mary Help of Christians |
The
world of international politics and diplomacy, of course, is very
complicated. Wringing our hands or
turning the other cheek isn’t an acceptable policy, but finding one that is
acceptable by the standards of Jesus isn’t simple either. At the beginning of the 5th century, in the
face of barbarian invasions, St. Augustine laid out a theory of just war—when,
how, and to what extent a nation might use force to defend itself and its vital
interests. We all have a moral
obligation to study that theory and then to apply it to the real world, just as
much as we have an obligation to learn the principles of sexual morality and of
respect for the life and reputation of others, which Jesus spoke of last week.
Charlie
Brown said, “Even paranoids have real enemies.”
Jesus recognized that people do have enemies, even nice people like his
disciples. There are a lot of people who
hate Christians and persecute them, still today. But Jesus tells us to love even our enemies
and persecutors. Not to trust them,
necessarily: but to wish them well and
pray for them—wish and pray that they might be converted to goodness rather
than hatred, for example; wish and pray that they might respond to the grace
that God offers to everyone, and be saved.
We need to pray for jihadists and abortionists and drug lords and human
traffickers and all evildoers. The
Gospel tells us that all things are possible for God; that includes the conversion
of the worst sinners.
But,
lest we get into judgment—Jesus condemns those who pass judgment on others—we
need to remember that conversion has to start with ourselves. None of us is actually “perfect as our
heavenly Father is perfect.” None of us
lives completely and wholeheartedly according to the teachings of Jesus. We all have some way to go before, in the
words of the Collect today, “we carry out in both word and deed what is
pleasing to” the Father.
