Homily for the 7th Sunday
in Ordinary Time Year A 2023
Introduction
When you hear Jesus say these words in
today’s gospel, “love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you”, what is your reaction? Don’t you ask, really? Really Jesus, you want me to love people who
have hurt me? You really want me to pray for those who attack me and persecute
me?
These words are part of the Sermon on the
Mount that we have been reading for the last couple of Sundays. They fit right in there with other radical
teachings like the beatitudes, like blessed are the poor. And so the casual hearer of these words might
be forgiven for wondering why Jesus is asking us to do the impossible.
Scripture and Theology
The key to understanding these seemingly
difficult demands of Jesus is in the last line of today’s gospel, where Jesus
says, “So be perfect, just as your
heavenly Father is perfect." In
other words, these demands are not your everyday ethical demands from wise
teachers like Plato, Confucius or even our own modern Miss Manners; nor are
they simply like the demands of our political and civil laws. No they come from on high. They challenge us to be perfect, to be holy
like God.
To be holy and to be perfect as our
heavenly Father, we have to start by understanding, what does it mean to
holy? What does it mean to be perfect? When I was a young boy in seminary, we
thought that the holy seminarian was the one who was pious, such as one who folded
his arms when he prayed, who spent hours in prayer, and basically wore religion
on his sleeves. Thankfully, as I
advanced in my studies, I learnt that while piety was certainly helpful on the
journey to holiness, it was not the essential element of holiness.
The essential element of holiness is being like
God; we pursue holiness when we try to set ourselves apart from the world of
sin, and give ourselves over to being like God.
Like God set the people of Israel apart from the rest of the nations as his
holy people, God also sets us Christians apart as his holy people. Unfortunately, for a long time, Catholics mistakenly
thought that only priests, nuns and brothers were holy, because they were set
apart by the Sacrament of Holy Orders and by Religious Profession. Thankfully
the Second Vatican Council reminded us that all the Baptized are called to
holiness (LG 39-42). We are set apart by
our baptism so that we can be dedicated to God and be like him.
And how do we do this? How do we set part ourselves for God? We love as God loves, not as the world tells
us to love. Listen again to how the Lord
expected the people of Israel to do this, as we heard in our first reading:
Be holy, for I,
the LORD, your God, am holy.
You shall not bear
hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.
Though you may
have to reprove your fellow citizen, do not incur sin because of him.
Take no revenge
and cherish no grudge against any of your people.
You shall love
your neighbor as yourself. I am the
LORD.
In other words, hatred and revenge are
incompatible with being holy like; but love, which is defined as willing the
good of the other, that is compatible with holiness, with being like God,
because God is love.
Yet in our day, hatred for others,
especially for those who are not like us, has become honourable, sometimes even
a requirement in politics and society. But
in line with what we heard in the first reading, Jesus tells Christians "love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father.” He is raising the bar for us, telling us that
he expects much more from us, if we are to be holy, to be set apart for
God. He asks: “For if you love those who love you. . . Do not the tax collectors do
the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do
not the pagans do the same?”
Perfection for Jesus means going beyond the common standards of justice
found in the world, the world of tax-collectors and pagans, terrorists and
murderers, society and the world. If we
are to be holy, we have to be above the fray, just like God, who does not bear
hatred for sinners but seeks their redemption.
You see the ethical standards of the world
are quite low. The tell us to dish out
our love with tea-spoons, and only to those we think deserve it, the good
people, the ones who treat us well. But
God’s standards are much higher. Jesus
tells us, “for he makes his sun rise on
the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” That higher divine love is what we are called
to imitate.
Similarly, revenge seems to be the order of
the day. Today grown men and women, like
children on the playground will say, “he hit me first, that is why I hit him
back.” While vengeance is a natural
human tendency, Jesus tells us that Christians cannot take an eye for an eye or
a tooth for a tooth, or even the pound of flesh that the Merchant of Venice
sought. While seeking justice against wrongdoers
is an honourable pursuit, the first reading was very clear: “Though you may have to reprove your fellow
citizen, do not incur sin because of him.” Our anger and response to evil
must not be evil itself; it must be righteous.
That is what holiness entails, that is what is what perfection means,
that is what being like God is.
Moreover, Christians may sometimes have to
forego even righteous revenge and just deserts, because that is exactly what
God the Father does to us; forgiving us when he should punish us, punishing us
less when he should punish us more. When
Jesus was on the cross, he did not take any eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth; instead, he gave his eye, he gave his tooth, he gave his life, so that
we who choose to be his enemies, might have life. That is the example he set for us Christians. That is probably why Luke's version of the
Sermon does not say
"be perfect as your heavenly Father
is perfect" but "Be merciful, just as [also] your Father is
merciful." Holiness and
perfection involve mercy.
And so as we come to the end of the Sermon
on the Mount, in which Jesus has been teaching a whole new way of being
perfect, of being holy, of being like God, Jesus is even going much farther
than the Old Testament laws. For the
Christian no longer is the law, "An
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." No longer is the ideal "You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy." For the Christian who wants to be perfect, he must love as God
loves.
Christian Life and Conclusion
The one place where we must start living
out this tall order is in our own families. Perhaps because of living in close proximity
that is where we offend each other most sometimes to the point of hating each
other. While the Lord is not asking us
to stay in toxic family situations, he is asking us to will the good of those
family members who hurt us, even if we must keep them at some distance. We will their good, by doing good for them,
for example, visiting them when they are sick, helping them out materially when
we can, but especially praying for them.
In a few moments, we shall approach the
altar of the Lord, to offer his sacrifice, to receive his sacrifice, to receive
the greatest sign of love that ever was.
None of us is worthy to receive this gift. But the Lord Jesus Christ, on the night
before he died and on the Cross left this gift behind for us. God gives himself to us so that we can become
like him. God became man so that we can
become God.
Two American idioms express this truth very
well. We say "Like father, like
son" when a child imitates his or her parents. We also say, "The apple does not fall
far from the tree," when a child takes after his parents. If we can attempt to imitate our human fathers
and our mothers, who if truth be told are quite imperfect, how about with, his
help, imitating our heavenly Father, who is perfectly holy, perfectly merciful,
perfectly loving? Can we be the apple
that does not fall far from the tree of the Cross, the tree on which perfect
love was displayed? As we have received
that love, should we not also share it with others?
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