7th Sunday Year A

See Commentary on Matthew 5:38-48


Homily 1 – 2011 

The recent events in Egypt have been interesting. A whole people rose up against an oppressive regime and, without violence, brought about its downfall. Apparently, they had seen what had happened in Tunisia. Hope welled up within their hearts – and that hope empowered them. They became aware of their possibilities, of their true human dignity – and took action. Their action was consistently non-violent.  It called for enormous courage; and, in their case, it paid off. The protesters in Bahrain and in Libya have not been so successful. Non-violent resistance chooses the way of vulnerability.  It is risky, and does not always pay off.

Over the past few weeks, we have been reflecting on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus had been addressing the oppressed peasantry of Galilee, the poor in spirit, who mourned, who hungered and thirsted for justice and universal righteousness. Jesus had tried to give them an insight into their dignity. He insisted that, before God, they mattered.  He tried to give them hope, and thereby to empower them: theirs is the Kingdom of heaven… they shall be comforted … they shall have their fill…

He made clear that the way to change was through mercy, purity of heart and peace-making. At the same time, he warned that his way was vulnerable.  In a world that resisted change, they could anticipate persecution. Yet, he insisted that his way was the only way that respected human dignity – their own and that of their oppressors as well.  Empowered by hope, they were to take action. They were to be salt of the earth – bringing about change, as they learnt to recognise and to respect their God-given dignity. By the example of the way they lived, they were to be light of the world.

What Jesus says in today’s Gospel could seem, at first sight, to undermine what he had been saying earlier. Offer the wicked man no resistance.  Is he saying: Let oppression and  injustice continue unchallenged? … Forget about your God-given dignity?  … Forget about calling the wicked to live in line with their true human dignity?  [When Jesus was struck on the face during his trial before Caiaphas, how did he respond? He stood tall.  He challenged the soldier to recognise the injustice of what he had done.  He did not make himself a doormat, nor allow another, unchallenged, to make him so.  His path was the path of active, non-violent, resistance.]  Words can be tricky.  What is correctly translated: Do not resist the evildoer, could equally accurately be translated: Do not violently resist the evildoer.  What is ruled out need not be resistance but violent resistance.

Look at the first illustration that Jesus gave. If anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well.  A hit to the right cheek  of another is a back-handed slap. It is the contemptuous action of superior to inferior, of master to servant. Offer the other cheek. What’s going on?  This isn’t submission. This is challenge – not unlike Jesus’ challenge to the soldier who struck him across the face. It is a statement of personal dignity.  It is an invitation to the other to recognise what has been done, and to act instead in a truly dignified manner. It is active, not passive. It is resistance. Crucially, it is non-violent.  And, of course, it is done in vulnerability. It is risky.  It may not work.

Jesus’ two other examples make similar points – though they suppose some familiarity with the historical background to make sense.  Ultimately, all three examples represent, perhaps paradoxically, a choice to love, to cooperate with God in making God’s kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.

In the nitty-gritty of everyday life, effective active, non-violent, resistance to injustice may call for some degree of imagination and creativity.


Homily 2 - 2014

It is important to remember, as we listen to today’s Gospel and to the rest of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount [last week’s too, and the week before!], that what Jesus is talking about is not some sort of post-graduate kind of personal holiness for those who might be interested in that sort of thing.  This is not about personal holiness.  This is about making the world liveable for everyone, and not just for the wealthy, the powerful and privileged.  It is particularly relevant to our world today – the world that our TV screens no longer allow us to ignore – riots in the Ukraine, riots in Thailand, slaughter continuing in Syria, on-going violence in Pakistan. The story goes on. Closer to home – What is happening on Manus Island? in Nauru? We don’t know. Keep people in the dark! It is not just the Church that tries to cover up! But it doesn’t quite work!

What can we do? What are our options? Tune out, as best we can, and get on with renovating our kitchens and improving our dinner menus? It is hard to keep coming to Mass every weekend and somehow to be satisfied with that. 

Jesus called us to be salt of the earth, light of the world. He trusts us to be agents of change. Was that understood when we were baptised? Or was it lost somewhere in the small print? We are in some way responsible for our world. We are in some way responsible for what went on in Manus Island last week [and will keep going on as long as traumatised people are treated as non-persons, kept in the dark and deprived of hope]. The psychological violence to which they are subjected is a sure recipe for physical violence of some kind, some time.

What can we do? Perhaps before asking that, we need to ask another question first… How do we approach whatever we might do? How does a disciple of Jesus approach changing the world? Do we fire up with the same sort of aggression, of power, of pressure, that seem to animate those we disagree with? That does not change the world - only more of the same!

Jesus was serious. His method was radical – frighteningly radical. He said that we start by loving our enemy! There is no other alternative to violence. We need to see that those we disagree with have an inviolable dignity – exactly the same dignity that we have. We need to respect them – genuinely. We need to learn the skills of dialogue. Jesus counsels praying for the violent. Is that a last-resort before giving-up? I like to think its purpose could be to provide the silence, the space, for me to listen to the heart of the other. Where is their violence coming from? The cry of anger is so often the cry of pain. Dialogue starts with listening, deep listening, contemplative listening.

But, if they won’t come to the negotiating table? We live in a democracy. Is pressure a kind of violence? It rarely changes what the other thinks. In Pope Francis’s recent document, The Joy of the Gospel, I came across the phrase: aggressive tenderness. What is that saying? If we look at the three examples Jesus gave in today’s Gospel to respond to violence, they are all examples of active, non-violent resistance [though unfortunately we need to know the world of Jesus’ day to appreciate that]. None of them is spineless resignation. Each of them is an active response, a challenge to re-consider, an effort, if you like, to conscientise the oppressor, but non-violent – risky, in the first instance, almost street-theatre in the second, and at a price in the third. Pressure without violence? I’m not sure. Perhaps not exactly aggressive tenderness – more like tender aggressiveness.

True disciples of Jesus are a minority in this country. We might not succeed in the short-term. But, if we take Jesus seriously, we have an imperative need to engage with injustice. We need to learn, and then to model to our world, the readiness to dialogue, the ability to listen, and the courage to speak the truth - and to do so always with profound respect.


 Homily 3 - 2017

Today’s Gospel sounds somewhat challenging, to say the least: Be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus was echoing a point already familiar to his hearers, that we heard in today’s First Reading: Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. Not unlike Jesus’ audience, we have heard the message before. Like them, hearing it may not have made a noticeable difference to us. The problem, as I see it, may be that we have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear. I wonder if that might always be the case. Remember how Jesus started off his public ministry, The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent; and believe the good news. ‘Repent’ essentially means, not what we have made it mean, but, ‘Think beyond, think more deeply, look again’. For me it means, don’t presume that I have exhausted what it means. Don’t assume that I have heard and put things into practice. We are constantly changing as our lives unfold – or at least, we can be. We are in a better position today to see more, to see differently, than we were a year ago. So, let’s take a fresh look, letting go the familiar – ready to see more deeply.

Be perfect! Be holy! Take holy first. Holy is what God is, what God is like. So, Be holy is to aim to be like God. Some Israelites took that to mean to take their worship seriously. The prophets told them they had got that wrong. Hosea summed it up this way: To live justly; to love tenderly; to walk humbly with your God. In today’s First Reading, we heard, Love your neighbor as yourself. It is easy to get things wrong, isn’t it!

Be perfect! was Jesus’ take on the issue. Essentially to be perfect is to be complete, consistent, inclusive. Jesus invited us to be perfect just as, in the way, in the same sense that, your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus had just described the Father’s way of being perfect, being consistent, being complete: God … causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike. He used the example, in fact, to illustrate in what sense God loves perfectly. No favourites, indiscriminately, obviously without prior conditions - largely unthanked but undaunted.

Do I honestly like that kind of God – the God who sees me as no more, or less, special than those people I do not like, those I reserve the right to criticise? We need to face that one squarely before pretending to go any further. How? I think the only way is to hang around God for as long as it takes to discover for ourselves the beautiful warmth of God’s love, the incredible depth and extent of that love, that does not become less personal simply because it extends out infinitely to embrace everyone; and then to be swept up into it.

We need to keep growing into that kind of loving. We understand it differently across life. Most people tend to want to move in that direction. I hope that that is how parents come to love their children. You love them simply because they are your children. Jesus’ challenge is to move beyond the natural family. He addressed all his listeners, indiscriminately, inviting them to become sons and daughters of your Father in heaven. In the Second Reading, St Paul simply said, You belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Sons and daughters of God – so brothers and sisters of each other. Perhaps it is easier for parents to love their children indiscriminately than it is for brothers and sisters to do so.

Still, we have a head start. Just by living, we share the love energy, the divine DNA, of our parent-creator God, made in the image of that God. Without understanding quite what it means, we become more real, more human, the more we have a go. Until we do, our world remains unchanged.


Homily 4 - 2020

I believe that today’s short Gospel passage with its “Love your enemies” gets to the very core of Jesus’ insight into life in the Kingdom, the central message to guide our lives if ever we want to make of our world a place to live peaceably. When Jesus used the word “enemies”, he was referring to everyone — from the one who might want to kill us, to the one who disagrees with us, towards whom we automatically sense even the least hostility or whom we simply do not like.

If we find ourselves saying to ourselves, “Yes!”, or “Of course!”, let’s be deeply grateful and rejoice. If we look around seeking somehow to soften the message or find some way out, then we need to try some more “deep listening”.

However, we need to listen to Jesus carefully, particularly his comment, “Offer the wrongdoer no resistance”. We need to read it in the context of its time. Jesus went on to offer three examples. A “slap on the right cheek” involved a backhander, a spontaneous gesture of superiority, the contemptuous gesture of a slave owner to the slave. Jesus said effectively to the slave, “Stand up straight, run the risk, and without a word challenge your owner to realise what he or she has done”. Giving up “the cloak as well” carried a similar message. It meant to stand up naked, risk the stupidity, and unmask the crude injustice of the other. Roman law allowed a Roman soldier to demand that a Jew carry the soldier’s load for a mile, but forbade him requiring anyone to carry it further. To go "two miles" would have the soldier disciplined by his commanding officer. All three examples chosen by Jesus were instances of non-violent resistance. To love does not necessitate passivity in the face of injustice — but it clearly rules out violence and supposes respect always for the human dignity of the wrongdoer.

I am still impressed by the response of Leila Abdallah, the mother of the three children who were killed recently by a drunken [or drugged] car-driver in Sydney. When interviewed soon after the accident, she said, ““I think in my heart I forgive him, but I want the court to be fair, right? It’s all about fairness. So I’m not going to hate him because that’s not who we are. And that’s not what our religion tells us. I forgive him, but I want it to be fair.”

When insisting on the non-negotiability of the need always to act from genuine love, even for enemies, Jesus was not setting up a moral obstacle course, with prizes for those who complete the course. The way of constant respect for human dignity, for care, for non-violence is simply unavoidable if we want to live in peace and harmony with fallible human persons.

However, we need clearly to differentiate feelings from responses. Feelings happen; responses are chosen. The habit we need to develop through regular practice is to notice our feelings and to step back from them before they sweep us up in some automatic hostile response. We do not have to get rid of the feeling — simply notice it, perhaps even draw on its energy.

With time and practice, we may even succeed in modifying our automatic reactions, allowing a certain benevolence to replace the usual hostility. We can cultivate, with God’s help, a steady response of joy in the midst of whatever happens to us. I am reminded of the breath-taking freedom of a twenty-nine year old Jewish woman named Esther Hillesum, an eventual victim of the gas-chambers of Auschwitz. She wrote: “The misery here is quite terrible; and yet, late at night … I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed-wire. And then time and again, the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent soars straight from my heart — I can’t help it … Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness”.


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.