7th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2023

For me, today’s short Gospel passage from St Matthew’s Gospel sums up the essence of the message which motivated Jesus’ own heart, and which most of all he wanted to share with the world.

John’s Gospel clearly made the point that “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.”

Jesus was a man with a mission, a mission to an unhappy world, a world that was destroying itself, with nations endlessly at war, and with individuals fearful of each other and instinctively competitive and hostile — this world, nevertheless, that God loved deeply.

Ours was the world into which Jesus stepped. He began his message reassuring the world that the ultimate energy behind everyone and everything is love, personal love, the love of God his Father. He proclaimed that God’s reign was at hand, and that this was definitely “Good News”. He called people to look again at themselves and each other, and to be open to the radical changes of personal attitude and behaviour that a new world order would require. They who were very much part of the problem would be indispensable to its solution. They would need to cooperate whole-heartedly with him. To embrace whole-heartedly what he would explain to them, they would need to believe him. They would need to trust.

Today, two thousand years later, it seems there is as big a problem facing us as faced Jesus’ contemporaries. The same changes of attitude and behaviour to which he invited them, lie before us. Today’s brief Gospel passage gives us a neat compendium.

There, Jesus had been talking about “loving our enemies” — which many of us might think ridiculous, were it not that Jesus said it [and which we might still think ridiculous, even though Jesus did say it]!

Jesus knew that what he was asking was difficult, even shocking, unthinkable. But he did not pull back from challenging everyone. Jesus had come into the world in order to save the world. And, whatever about anyone else, he would not be satisfied with merely improving things.

He was not as unreal as we think. Loving is a choice, a general attitude. It need not be a feeling, an affectionate feeling, and usually isn’t — perhaps anything but. Essentially, loving involves respecting others, their God-given human dignity. Perhaps it extends to being concerned for them, even caring about them. It certainly means withholding all deliberate hostility towards them. But, since we are all individuals, we inevitably think and feel differently from each other. Loving does not mean that we share another’s values, that we agree with their attitudes or their ideas or their behaviours.

Fortunately, we often find that when we choose to love another, our fears of them and their attitudes grow less, as also may any spontaneous feelings of hostility.

Jesus was serious about all this, very serious. He went on to add: “…be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. [The word “perfect” need not put us off. A better translation might be “consistent” or “thorough”or “of one piece” — or shades of all three. When applied to us, it also carries the sense of “complete” or “whole”].

If you were thinking of some comparison to illustrate our loving God’s loving “perfectly”, would you ever have come up with the one that Jesus chose: “[God] causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and his rain to fall on the honest and the dishonest alike”? It is so simple and so obvious — and yet so true.

We can learn to love like that. The issue is: Do we want to?

As I have said before, our readiness to trust Jesus will be a factor of the quality of our personal friendship with him — which is a factor, usually, of our praying with him.