Sunday 20 February 2011

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary time 20 February 2011

Homily for Seventh Sunday of the Year 20 February 2011

Today we continue our way through the compendium of Jesus’s teachings that we call the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s Gospel comes at the end of a passage in which Our Lord is explaining that the commandments of the Jewish law, good as they stand of course, have got to be considered and followed through in all their implications. So just before todays’ Gospel we have the bit about “you know ‘you shall not kill’ but I say ‘don’t get angry either’” and “you know it says ‘you shall not commit adultery’ but I say ‘if you are lusting after a woman, that’s just as bad’”. In other words, what we have here is Jesus saying that sin is not just about our actions- killing someone or sleeping with them- but about what is going on in our minds, because that is where all sin starts, with our unguarded, unchecked thoughts. Once we let all sorts of wrong thoughts romp around in our minds, we are bringing acting those thoughts out all the closer! So be careful what you think about! And so to today’s Gospel, which looks at first glance as if it is about that very common human failing, the desire for retaliation- getting our own back on the people who do us wrong- which seems such a natural reaction in us.
Jesus reminds us his hearers that the Jewish law- we find it in Deuteronomy 19- states “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. How barbaric and bloodthirsty that sounds! In fact this was really an attempt by the Jews to bring a sense of balance to the seeking of revenge; this idea of being satisfied with like for like was brought in, in common with many other law codes of the ancient world, to bring a halt to the momentum of revenge, to vendettas that could go on and on. To begin with there was a desire for endless revenge: you remember how in Genesis this growth in violence so saddens God that he thinks of destroying mankind once and for all in the flood. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, gloats at having killed a man for striking him and wants to go on and on: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold”. (Gen 4 xxiv). The Jews even before Our Lord’s time had moved on from “an eye for an eye” to what is called the Silver Rule, of Rabbi Hillel, which was basically “don’t do anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want them to do to you”, which effectively ruled out killing them or knocking their eye out. We actually find this in the Bible too, in the book of Tobit, which was written probably about 200 years before Our Lord’s time. Tobit is sending his son Tobias off on a mission and gives him a lot of good advice, including this: “And what you hate, do not do to anyone” (Tob 4 xv). That is good advice of course, but still is a negative thing, it’s about what not to do. Our Lord is going to improve on this in two further steps. There is the so-called Golden Rule, coming up a bit later on in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7 xii), something much more positive! And then here, the greatest refinement of all in our way of dealing with our fellow human beings when they mess us around: “But I say this to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.
Why have we got to do this annoying and unnatural thing? Well, the reason is simply this: we are created in the first place in the image and likeness of God and we have got to become – this is the essence of the Christian life we are all trying to lead- we have got to become bit by bit more like God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. And that means we can’t hate or punish anybody, because those are not things that God does. We sometimes wish he did, we’d quite like to see Mrs So-and-so next door get struck by lightning, after all, she deserves it the way she goes on, and surely God must hate that mob who burnt a church down the other day…. But God is the Creator of all humanity and loves all of his creation, loves all of us human beings unconditionally, indeed we can say loves us indiscriminately. How does Our Lord put it? “He causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike”.
And that is a huge problem for us, because it offends us- in fact I think we often experience this impartiality of God as a kind of injustice. We want God to be on our side as indeed he is, but the thing is, that doesn’t stop him being on other people’s side too, because they, whoever they are, are also his children, whether they know it or like it or accept it or not. The Jews, even though in their first centuries they were often tempted to talk about God as their very own, the God of Israel and so on, even they were aware- if only fleetingly sometimes- that there was more to God than that, that he was everybody’s God. There is an early hint of this when Joshua is planning his great attack on Jericho as part of the conquest of the Promised Land. He has a vision of God, who appears to him as a man holding a drawn sword. As the Jerusalem Bible has it: “And Joshua walked towards him and said to him ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied ‘On neither side’. ” (Josh 5 xiv) There you have it spelt out: ‘On neither side’. The readings we have had during this week from the Old Testament have said the same thing: we had Deuteronomy the other day, where God says “You must be impartial” (Deut 1 xvii NJB) and today in Leviticus “You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart….you must not exact vengeance nor must you bear a grudge”.
When it comes to getting to grips with the impartiality of God, this God who sends his rain on everybody regardless, we have to admit we baulk at it. But there it is for us in Scripture in the clearest terms- whose side is God on? “On neither side”. We must try as we grow in our Christian life, as we grow into the person God wants us to be, that person with godlike qualities, that person who has something of the divine about him or her, to acquire something of this impartiality, for we have as our aim “to be perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect”. Dear Jesus, help us to practise in our own lives that impartiality of our heavenly Father, who loves all his creatures with even-handed love; take from our hearts the grudges that we nurture there, the prejudices that form so easily and firmly in our minds; give us instead the desire to be perfect even as our heavenly father is perfect. Amen.

S

Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 30 January 2011
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.