Homily for the
7th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Feb. 19, 2023
Matt 5: 38-48
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
“Be
perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5: 48).
We continue listening to the Sermon on the Mount, that radical core of the Gospel. Today’s the 4th Sunday in a row in which Matthew and Holy Mother Church lay the Sermon before us. We’re challenged to decide whether Jesus’ words feast our souls or make them uneasy. Next Sunday we’ll be in Lent, which will present its own challenges to us.
“Be
perfect like your heavenly Father” sounds like an impossible command. Who can be as perfect as God is? Aren’t we all weak, fallible, and sinful?
Yes,
we are. So Christ challenges us to
strive to be more like God—not in our power to work miracles, never to make
mistakes or be forgetful, but in our striving for holiness. One of the beatitudes, you remember, is
“blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” to be right with
God, to be in his grace. In the reading
from Leviticus, God commanded, “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy”
(19:2). In our gathering prayer, the
Collect, we prayed that we might “carry out in both word and deed what is pleasing
to” God.
What
pleases God, what makes us more like God, what reflects the holiness of God, both
Leviticus and Jesus advise us: love your
neighbor; don’t cherish a grudge; be generous; forgive.
Christianity
is distinctive among the religions of the world in commanding us to love our
enemies, to forgive injuries, to pray for our persecutors. One may have personal persecutors—there are
people who don’t like us for some reason; as Charlie Brown once said, even
paranoids have enemies. And there are classes
of people who are persecuted because of their religion, their politics, their
skin color, their sex, or some other characteristic. Jesus makes no distinctions. God makes no distinctions: “Your heavenly Father makes his sun rise on
the bad and the good…” (5:45).
It
is really hard to love an enemy or to forgive an unjust injury to our
person, our reputation, or our sense of self-worth. Bp. Robert Barron comments:
“We want God
to behave as we would—that is to say, to withdraw his love from those who don’t
deserve it and to give his love to those who do deserve it. But that is just not the way God operates.
“Why should you pray for someone who is
persecuting you? Why shouldn’t you be
allowed at least to answer him in kind—an eye for an eye? Because God doesn’t operate that way, and you
are being drawn into the divine life.”[1]
Pope
Francis has insisted that “the name of God is mercy.” If we want to be holy as the Lord our God is
holy; if we want to be drawn into the divine life—into eternal life—then we
must practice mercy.
Practicing
mercy may mean having compassion on the poor, the needy, the homeless, the
sick, the refugee, the victim of a natural disaster. It also means forgiving those who trespass
against us, as we say in the prayer that Jesus taught us.
What
if our hearts are unwilling or unable to forgive? What if we can’t get over the guy who blew a
red light and almost crashed into us?
What about the person at the office who backstabs everyone? What about the relative we just can’t get
along with? What about someone who’s
cheated us financially? What about
someone who’s killed a friend or a family member? What about the Taliban, drug dealers,
abortionists, and war criminals?
Jesus
commands us to pray for all of them. We
can pray their hearts change, they change their ways, they undergo a
conversion. They need God’s grace.
We
even need to pray that our own hearts change for the better. Hatred and bitterness don’t do us any good,
do they? You know that after a wound or
surgery, you can be left with a physical scar that takes years to heal or maybe
never disappears. (Back in the early
’90s, I had carpal tunnel surgeries, and I still have beautiful scars.) Some wounds scar our hearts for a very long
time, take a long time to heal. If we
keep rubbing them, scratching them, they’ll never heal. If we ask God to help us heal, to soften our
hard hearts, progress is possible. It’s
not only our enemies who need grace. All
of us need it.
In
the 2d reading, St. Paul contrasts the wisdom of this world with divine
foolishness. The world tells us to get
even, to get the other guy before he gets you.
Divine foolishness tells us to let the Spirit of God work within
us. (1 Cor 3:16-20). The Spirit of God that dwells in us works to
heal us if we allow him to, if we call upon him. The Spirit of God that dwells in us works to
make us more like God in our thoughts, words, and actions. When we’re made whole, we’ll be ready for the
divine life.
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