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.