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7th Sunday: Love without boundaries

"But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute . . ."

Sunday Word: http://usccb.org/bible/readings/022314.cfm

(Listen to video above from Jesus of Nazareth)

Lev 19: 1-2, 17-18
1 Cor 3: 16-23
Mt 5: 38-48

Anger management classes are very beneficial to those who have trouble containing their negative emotions – the uncontrolled urge to lash out verbally or in the worst cases, to inflict physical harm. While most of us loose our cool now and then, for those who simply cannot check their temper, there are practical steps that can be taken.

Some say, “Count to 10.” That’s actually not bad advice because it offers an opportunity to step back and take a breath before we say or do something we would greatly regret.

Regular exercise or any form of physical activity is a great stress reliever. Learning to not take things personally or so seriously all of the time is also a wonderful way to grow emotionally and frankly become more pleasant to be around.

But, with all the practical steps, would anyone say: Love those who give you no reason to love them. Rather than seeking punishment that equals the crime, offer forgiveness and no further resistance to injury. Love your enemy.

Our gut will answer, that’s foolish. Should we not resist evil? Don’t we have a right to defend ourselves? Why should I love the one who does harm to me? If my home is broken in to or my loved ones harmed, why would I not seek some form of justice? To all of these questions we would want a reasonable answer of “yes.”

Yet, Jesus’ teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, our Gospels for the last few Sundays, and this Sunday in particular, present us with both an ethical and moral challenge. If we simply take them literally, they make Jesus sound over the top to say the least. Is he really advising us to be doormats or wimpy sissys? Of course not. He certainly wasn’t in the face of opposition.

But, there is a transforming element about heroic love. This is not love for your enemies in the sense of having warm and fuzzy feelings about them. Our natural response, which essentially is primal in our development, is to defend ourselves against further harm. That may mean some form of retaliation in order to stop the aggressor.

But, as followers of Jesus, as Christian men and women, our task is to transform the world around us. To live by higher moral principles which present an alternative way to live based upon mercy, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation and charity after the example of Jesus’ himself. To love our enemy is to be like God. To seek no harm to them based upon “an eye for an eye” but rather to hope for their conversion to a better way of life. The point of punishment is not to inflict harm but to bring about a change in behavior. The power of charity in the face of hostility is to be like God who seeks the conversion of all that he touches and to bring us back on the mark.

Fr. Robert Barron, well-known Catholic speaker, speaks about “divinization.” Jesus is inviting us into his life, the Father’s way of loving. He is calling the human race to be transformed into a new relationship with God and with each other. To be like God is to be perfect, “. . . just as your heavenly Father is perfect” as we hear at the end of our Gospel this Sunday.

But, the human heart does not naturally offer love and forgiveness. We are not perfect people but we do have the capability of acting in a heroic way. Virtue is something that we must practice and as hatred is easily spread everywhere so too must love have no limits.

To be perfect as our heavenly Father is to rise above our natural inclination to seek revenge, demand justice, write someone off as hopeless, turn the cold shoulder or hand them the silent treatment, avoid them all together, or plot some sort of harm to be inflicted on them in retaliation.

If I seek the higher, not easy path, that Jesus offers, through his grace I can become divinized or transformed or “holy” as “the Lord your God” is holy, as we hear in our first reading this Sunday from Leviticus.

And the further part is that such heroic love has the power to transform not just “me” but also the aggressor through the example I give. Isn’t this a better way to live? St. Paul reminds us that the greatest of all virtues is love. Not a love filled with gushy feelings but a love that is used as a weapon of grace in response to hatred.

Can this be national policy between warring countries? Most would probably think that foolish since the level of hostility, unforgiveness, deception, suspicion, greed, selfishness, and self-interest is so strong. Sadly, we must defend ourselves through brute force at times but should never be the first to fire. That’s another discussion indeed.

So, the application of Jesus’ teaching must be made one person at a time; one married couple at a time; one family at a time; values imbued into business policies and practices one at a time; one institution of education at a time; one parish at a time, and so on. May God’s grace, always available to us, not be waiting in the wings for us to begin our God-like behavior. For our sharing in the Holy Eucharist is a sharing in the life of the One who made the ultimate sacrifice of self-sacrificing love for the good of humanity.

Grant, we pray, almighty God,

that, always pondering spiritual things,

we may carry out in both word and deed,

that which is pleasing to you.

(Collect: Roman Missal)

Insight Scoop

The Challenge of Perfection, The Call to Holiness

"Sermon on the Mount" by Gustave Dore

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, February 23, 2014 | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Lev 19:1-2, 17-18
• Psa 103:1-2, 3-4, 8, 10, 12-13
• 1 Cor 3:16-33
• Matt 5:38-48

“To be perfect,” the priest said in concluding his homily, “means that you should be the best policeman, or fireman, or Indian chief, that you can be.” I sat, rather perplexed, in a parish I occasionally visited for daily Mass. However well intentioned the priest was in his remarks, it seemed to me that he was shying away from the direct and difficult words in the Gospel reading: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Those words, without a doubt, are among the most challenging in the entire Bible, and yet I suspect they might also be among the most avoided and ignored. A more well-known and oft-quoted statement, which opens today’s Gospel reading from the Sermon on the Mount, is this: “When someone strikes you on your right check, turn the other one as well.” We’ve all heard many homilies about turning the other cheek, and it is undoubtedly a challenging thing to consider, let alone put into practice.

The same is also true of the other commands given by Jesus in this section: to give one’s cloak (an outer garment) to the man who sues for one’s tunic (the inner garment); to carry a load a second mile for the man—likely a Roman soldier, in the immediate context—who demands a mile of service; to love and pray for one’s enemies and persecutors. Each of these leads up to the command to be perfect, which is the climax and summation of this first part of the great Sermon.

What, then, to make of it? Monsignor Ronald Knox, in a sermon titled, “Our Retaliation”, provided a basic insight that is most helpful, saying that “the difference between the old law and the new law is that the old law issues a series of commandments which have got to be obeyed, whereas the new law instills into Man’s heart a spirit of active charity which ought to make commandments unnecessary for him.” The old law was given to a people in need of teaching about the proper limits of justice and retaliation, summed up in the saying, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” So a foundational principle of morality is learning where the lines are drawn, of learning what is sinful and contrary to the good.

But even the old law pointed to something much greater, as we hear in today’s first reading: “Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes to the essential heart of the old law and reveals it afresh and completed, possible only through his authority and interpretation. Yet it goes beyond even that, for the Son of God lived the new law to perfection. He did not resist the betrayal of an evil man, he turned the other cheek when struck by soldiers, he was violently stripped of his garments, and he prayed for his persecutors as he died: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).

Vatican II’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” reflecting at length on the “universal call to holiness”, says, “The Lord Jesus, the divine Teacher and Model of all perfection, preached holiness of life to each and everyone of His disciples of every condition. He Himself stands as the author and consumator of this holiness of life: ‘Be you therefore perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect’.” It then remarks that those who are justified in Christ through baptism “truly become sons of God and sharers in the divine nature.”

The Greek word for “perfect” is “teleios”, which means full and complete, and refers to moral perfection. It is, in other words, a call to holiness. God, who is all-holy, has created man so he can share—by the gift of grace—in his perfect, holy, and divine life. Our temporal vocations as policemen and such are important, but our everlasting vocation is to be a complete child of God.

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the February 20, 2011, issue of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)