HOMILY FOR THE 7TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR A.
Rev. Fr. Ezekoka Peter Onyekachi
If you take a close look at this Sunday’s Readings, you will notice the connection between the First Reading (Lev 19:1-2, 17-18) and the Gospel (Mt 4:38-48). What is the connection? It’s the call to perfection through love and forgiveness. In the Gospel, Jesus continues to enhance the teachings of the Old Testament Commandments (the Law) which we looked at last Sunday. Jesus continues to distinguish between the letter of the Law and the spirit of the Law. To point us in the direction of perfection in holiness, he expands upon the demands of forgiveness and of love. Let’s unpack these demands so that we can employ them in our own lives.
Echoing the message of the First Reading ‘Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy’, the Gospel concludes with these beautiful words: You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect. If we take the three readings as a whole, recognizing that the readings begin and end on the same theme, we see that the message of the day is incorporated in an inclusio. In Biblical exegesis, an inclusio is a literary device that repeats in the conclusion words similar to those in the introduction. This device is used by some exegetes to showcase a particular theme, or as a vehicle to make a particular point. In this Sunday’s Readings, the theme showcased is that of the search for perfection through love and forgiveness.
Let’s begin by looking through the eyes of the First Reading at the DOs and the DON’Ts about how to progress in holiness. The passage starts with the DON’Ts and proceeds to the DOs!
1. The DON’T is: You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart. The DO is: you must openly tell him...what his offence is – in other words, you must actually tell him what he has done wrong. He doesn’t read minds, so tell him. Your own desire for peace and love must be rooted in the depths of your heart. The Psalmist prays create in me a pure heart and put your right spirit within me (Ps. 51:10).
2. The next DON’T is: You must not exact vengeance nor must you bear a grudge against the children of your people. The DO is: you must love your neighbour as yourself. Theology tells us (and history and experience demonstrate) that love is the only way to crush a vengeful spirit and to stop ourselves bearing grudges.
These notions are tackled in the Gospel. Our Lord refers to a Jewish law – the Lex talionis (Exodus 21:23-25) – which states that if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and so on. In his mission to fulfil the Law, Christ harked back to the original reason that lay behind that law, which was to place a limit on the extent of vengeance that could be enacted. If someone poked your eye out, whether on purpose or by accident, you could no longer lawfully murder the offender and his family and appropriate his land to yourself. The Law said you could have his eye poked out too, and then you were all square. So there is no doubt that the primary intention of the Lex talionis was to limit violence, limit vengeance, and to promote peace. It didn’t allow people to take the Law into their own hands. Only a court of law could hand down punishment and penalties (cf. Deut. 19:18). In his supranatural wisdom, because he is God, Jesus fulfils the Law by upgrading it “but I say this to you”. Instead of merely limiting vengeance and bringing about an absence of war through deterrents (as laid out in the Lex talionis), Christ exhorts us to bring about genuine peace through exercising the law of love. Only love serves both as an antidote to vengeance and also as a route to perfection.
To love everyone made in the image of God, it is not necessary to like them as well. Real love is not soft and sentimental. There are plenty of people we don’t like, and there are plenty of people for whom we feel warmth and affection. The real love we are talking about here – Christian love expressed in response to God’s love for us - is how we treat absolutely everybody we encounter. In our daily lives, love can manifest itself in many ways. These include:
1. Our ability to forgive, and not to retaliate when someone winds us up.
2. Our ability to make personal sacrifices in order to help those in need.
3. Our ability to pray for our enemies (including people who don’t like us, for no good reason that we can see), and never to wish evil upon anyone.
4. Our ability to accept and reach out to everyone, regardless of their physical characteristics, geographical background, educational background, accomplishments (or lack of) and horrible habits.
If we press on with loving people day in, day out, year in, year out, eventually that love reshapes us to mirror our heavenly Father Who is compassion and love (Ps. 102). We progress along the path towards the perfection of our heavenly Father, but we cannot make it on our own, saddled as we are with flawed human nature. We travel in the company of the angels and saints, in the power of the Lord Jesus, confident that our prayers for God’s assistance will be answered. He blesses us with his strength, and He graces us with his supernatural wisdom. We need the grace of God to continue to make perfect that which is already good in us, and to help us to be rid of everything in us which is not good. The degree to which we are open to divine grace is an indicator of the depth of wisdom within us.
Wisdom – ‘being wise’ – doesn’t lie in the acquisition of worldly power, worldly wealth or worldly knowledge. These are merely temporal, and we leave them behind - we lose the lot! - when we die physically. Genuine wisdom lies in the acquisition of divinely-given powers, in the riches of spirituality and in the keeping of God’s word and commandments while we have the God-given time to do so. The Second Reading (1 Cor 3:16-23) presents us with a challenge: if any one of you thinks of himself as wise … then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise. Why? Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. Wisdom lies in being with God, in doing His will and in loving our neighbours. All of our neighbours, not just a select few – not just the ones we like. Open your eyes! The one thing everyone here can do to reflect God’s love for us, is to demonstrate that same inclusive love and care for each and every person whom God sends to cross our path. When we genuinely forgive and forget, as God does, and when we genuinely love, as God does, we are conduits of the wisdom of God to the world.
And finally, let’s have a look at forgiveness. Sometimes forgiveness is easy: someone does something to you by mistake, is upset and says ‘sorry’ and means it. Sometimes forgiveness is hard-to-impossible: someone does something terrible to you on purpose, and mumbles what you hope might be an apology under their breath. Real forgiveness implies that you are ready to accept an action and to forgive it even before forgiveness is asked for. A good way of helping ourselves to embrace forgiveness and love is to see deeper inside those people who annoy us, irritate us, are totally alien to us, or who intend us harm. What we often fail to see is that, privately, they feel disappointed with themselves. Sometimes they go home tearful, regretting that they lost control and hurt us. Whenever we think of these people as enemies, we fail to see them as human beings, flesh and bone with individual personalities like ourselves, human beings who are struggling just as much as we are to be better as the days and years go by. Even after his bad life, the Good Thief on the cross (St Dismas) had a heart that went out to his innocent Lord in His suffering. Even St. Augustine of Hippo, after his bad start, searched for God and became a saint who was highly regarded for his love. As we begin to see others the way God sees them, forgiveness becomes easier and easier. On the cross, Jesus prayed to His Father: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. The Christ has taught us by his words and actions how to love and to forgive. Wherever we are in life, let’s try to emulate Jesus’ words and deeds by accepting others for who they are, and by loving them for His sake. Amen. God bless you.
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