John or the Cross: In the evening of life, you will be judged on love alone.

Seventh Sunday in  OT  A  2020

The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of the Gospel of Matthew comprise the teachings of Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount.  Today’s Gospel passage is the rhetorical highpoint of Jesus’s teaching from this sermon.  Listen again to the words of Jesus:

“Offer no resistance to one who is evil…Turn the other cheek…Hand over your cloak as well…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Yes, to love your enemies is the greatest test of love.  These are kind and beautiful words when they are spoken in Church, but the thing is these words are hardly ever spoken outside of Church.  They are not spoken out on the street or in the relationships of our lives when we have been hurt or betrayed or lied to.

The first Scripture reading from the Book of Leviticus tees up today’s Gospel message. “The Lord said to Moses:  “Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them. ‘You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.’”

 I think of the saintly Nelson Mandela who was wrongly imprisoned and abused for 27 years.  When he was elected the President of South Africa following his imprisonment, what did he do?  He invited those who imprisoned and tortured him to first row seats for his presidential inauguration.  He declared that I would be the loser if I could not forgive those who imprisoned him.  I would suggest that Nelson could only have experienced healing and forgiveness in his heart by the grace of God.

By telling his followers to turn the other cheek, Jesus calls on them to resist tendencies toward punishment.  Implicitly, Jesus introduces the idea of reconciliation rather than retaliation.  Jesus does not want his followers to be abused and taken advantage of, as the passage might suggest.  When Jesus says, “Offer no resistance to one who is evil.”  He does not mean to do nothing in the face of injustice, Jesus insists that his community reject and work against retaliation by focusing on love.

Jesus advocates love over hate.  Loving our enemies is the greatest test of love.  For some of us, this requires spiritual heart surgery. We come again to Ash Wednesday, the entry point for another 40 Day journey toward Easter.  We are signed with the ashes of repentance, of our awareness of our limitations, of our need for conversion.  We willingly embrace Lenten spiritual disciplines so that we can prepare ourselves for the grace of conversion, for the joy of Easter.

The Season of Lent isn’t just about doing without or giving up something; the real meaning of Lent is the Church’s annual call to conversion.  It involves a change of mind-set.  We seek to put on Christ and to live by the values of the Gospel.  It is to move the focus away from self-centeredness and to become God-centered in our life perspective.

In this holy season of Lent, may our reflection on the ministry of Jesus lead us to deepen our holy longing for God in our lives.  May we respond to the Church’s call to conversion as we put on Christ and as we express our solidarity with people in need.

Questions to ask ourselves:

How can I work toward reconciliation instead of retaliation?

Who do I need to love?

Who do I need to pray for?

Who is m enemy that needs to be loved?

As we engage in the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and self-denial,  we seek to develop some spiritual will power.  But to delve into the deeper meaning of our Lenten spiritual disciplines, may we pray again over the Lord’s Sermon of the Mount in today’s Gospel. 

The first requirement of discipleship of Jesus is to love  -- even to love our enemies, to strive for reconciliation rather than retaliation.

For us to love our enemies, to offer no resistance, to turn the other cheek and to share our cloak with someone in need, we seek the grace of the Word of God that is spoken as ashes on placed on our foreheads this Ash Wednesday:  “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.”

The message is we are all one family under God.

Consider this, whenever we sin we are disconnected from God and become His “enemies” (James 4:4), but His love for us does not go extinct (Romans 5:7-10). He keeps looking out for us with his love as the father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-31). On the cross, our Lord Jesus Christ showed love to his executioners (enemies) when he tearfully prayed for them: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing?” Don’t you think that those enemies of yours do not know what they are doing and need your love?

Today’s message of love is a very tough one; it is at the same time the only way. To bring the message closer to us, we are encouraged to love without limits. Your enemy deserves more love and compassion from you than anyone else. To love is not a choice; it is rather a grave instruction. 

In the Gospel of John (13:34-35), our Lord Jesus presents a new framework for love as he says:

I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

From the passage above, we learn that love is a normative prescription for our Christian life. Furthermore, it gives those who embrace it an identity “by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

In the words of the great mystic, St. John of the Cross:  “In the evening of life, we will be judged by love alone.”

Have a Blessed Day.

Is Jesus a law breaker or a law keeper?

Sixth Sunday in OT A 2020

To ask you a rather odd question:  Is Jesus a law breaker or a law keeper?

From the perspective of the critique of Jesus against the legalism of the Scribes and Pharisees, in Jesus extending the merciful love of God to sinners, you can say that Jesus dismisses the preoccupation of law- keeping and emphasizes the mercy and the love and the compassion of God.  From the perspective of the scribes and pharisees, Jesus seems to be a law breaker.  Jesus was eventually crucified because the leaders of religion and government considered Jesus to be a law breaker.

On the other hand, Jesus is clear in today’s Gospel in saying: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.  I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.  Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.”

The real message of Jesus in today’s Gospel is yes we need to live very ethically and have a deep respect for the rule of law.  The commandments are not just suggestions or guidelines.  We are to obey the commandments.  But Jesus is also saying very clearly that rule keeping is not the end of the story; we are called to be disciples in which we seek to encounter Jesus in prayer and in daily life.

Discipleship of Jesus is deeper than obedience to the law.  Jesus fulfills the law by demanding more in the way of love.  Discipleship demands conversion of heart.

It should not surprise us that Jesus goes beyond the requirements of the laws of the Old Testament, even while saying they need to be observed.  In this section of Matthew’s gospel Jesus fleshes out a deeper meaning and intent of the commandments.  For example, when he speaks of the sin of murder, the taking of another’s life, he speaks of it as including the diminishment of a person’s life by harsh words or actions.

We can keep all the rules but if our hearts are not filled with the joy of the Gospel in the words of Pope Francis, we haven’t experienced the conversion of our hearts.

For example, in living out the Sacrament of Marriage, it is not just a legal contract of an eye for an eye and not committing adultery.  Marriage is a lifelong covenant of love in which two people are called to love and honor each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health for all the days of their lives. 

Today’s Gospel calls us to the vision of discipleship that while detail and discipline can train us in keeping the rules, we can only discover how to love through forgiving those who have hurt us irrespective of whether they ask for forgiveness or not,  or are repentant or not.  We can only discover how to love by helping those in need, whether they deserve help or not.  We can only discover how to love by standing with those who are oppressed even if it is dangerous for us.  Yes, we live in complex times in which we wonder about the morality of issues of immigration, of homeland security and the like.  The Lord calls to welcome and to stand with people who are in need.  We can only discover how to love by asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds with wisdom.

Discipleship of the Lord Jesus is not taking the easy road of lax morality; rather our discipleship leads us to follow the example of the one who laid down his life for our salvation and out of love for each and every one of us.

We are called to more than just keeping the rules.  We are called to love deeply.  May our prayerful question be not just about rule-keeping but how do I discern to say YES to the plan of God for my life. 

Jesus offers a much more challenging ethic than legalism because we are not able to say we’ve met our obligation as long as anyone goes hungry or suffers oppression or is abandoned and alone.  This ethic requires endless charity. 

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount presents Jesus as the new Moses, not as a lawgiver but as a guide who shows us a life full of blessing, of joy, and service to people in need.

For me as a priest confessor in the beautiful sacrament of reconciliation, the priest is not meant just to  be a spiritual attorney general determining whether the law has been broken or not, or whether a particular action is a sin or not; rather, the primary ministry of the priest is to communicate the healing, forgiving, merciful love of Jesus.  Yes, the priest can provide needed counsel, but more importantly the priest is to share the merciful love of Jesus with the penitent.

As we celebrate the Eucharist, may we be mindful of today’s Gospel:  “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go and first be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

The lesson for us clear.  This is how seriously God views our human relationships.  We cannot hate our neighbor – no matter who he or she is, no matter whether they deserve it or not – and then say we love God.  For whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to Christ himself.

To give a preview to next Sunday’s Gospel, we are to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

In the words of Pope Francis, “my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving.   Jesus does not tire of saying to us:  Give them something to eat.”

In the Gospel, we hear no ordinary rabbi interpreting the Torah but One whom we already know to be God’s beloved Son not “going light” on the law and the prophets but going deeper and challenging us to reach beyond the letter of the law to the fulfillment realized only in self-sacrificing live.

May all of us have a blessed day as disciples of the Lord Jesus.