NewCreation

Homily for Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023 A

The 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today we continue straight on with the Sermon on the Mount and the remainder of the so-called antitheses: "You have heard it said, but I say to you," from Matthew's Gospel. As I attempted to bring out last time, these aren't really antitheses, which presupposes one being against the other — like the old way bad, the new way good. It's an attempt to bring out what the heartfelt intent, the real matter at the center of the law, was really about. So, as you will see, that pattern follows in today's readings with "you have heard" and "what I say to you." So we begin with what is known as the Lex Talionis: "You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And we hear this and we think, oh, that's awfully cruel. But in fact it's worth remembering that this law was an enormous step forward in the ancient world into the business of what law was all about at all. We get elements of it from the Code of Hammurabi, other ancient Middle Eastern legal tablets that have survived, and it appears three times in the Hebrew Scriptures. I'll just give you the Levitical example, just as a point of reference: "Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered." Now what we typically forget when we hear that is that the purpose of this law was not to inflict punishment but to prevent vengeance. It was a strict limitation of the amount of violence you could extract on the person who had done you harm. You could not take back from them more than they had taken from you. That was the point of it. The point of it was to stop the spiral of vengeance, which can be so devastating amongst groups, and is how things were before it became possible to have a system of laws. So the very basis of the system of law is the desire to stop vengeance. And what Jesus is saying is: "But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." And he's going to give some examples now which are about stepping outside the world of vengeance. Rivalry and vengeance are the two great enemies of humanity in the Hebrew Scripture and in the New Testament. And here we see Jesus teaching absolutely firmly against those two. The whole point of the Holy Spirit, which he's going to give us, is that it's going to take us away from the world of rivalry and vengeance. So when he says, "Do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also," this is not an instruction saying, if someone does you harm, allow yourself to be walked all over. It's saying, respond in a clever way that doesn't actually meet them face to face. It's not a question of being pushed into rivalry with them, because if you do that you'll simply be going back and forth until one of you destroys the other. It goes on forever. So the suggestion is: someone strikes you with the outside of their right hand — that would be assumed to be the strike that would knock you on this cheek. Excuse me, it's awfully difficult to do this facing a camera, as you can perhaps imagine, but that will be the way to show your utter contempt for someone. But by turning the other cheek, you're inviting them to slap you with the inside of their hand, which is a way of bringing you close together with them, but comes closer to the form of slap that is a friendly, comradely way of twitting each other. In other words, you are beginning to undo by your gesture the frame of violence that the original smiter wanted to do to you. You're showing you're not run by the same engine as he is. In fact, by him carrying on in the same violent way, he's actually ending up in an entirely different position than the one he wanted to. You're producing a trick. "If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well." This is the equivalent of: if anybody wants your outer garments, give them your inner garments as well. In other words, you want my shirt? Have my underpants. It's a way of saying, "Yeah, go on, go on, go on, I don't mind being here naked in the midst of you." But of course that puts the person who's making these demands on you in the uncomfortable situation of having made someone naked in public, which means that other people are likely to come in and want to sort the situation out. You're refusing to be caught up in the same dynamic of violence as the other person, and so you're putting them in a position whereby their own impetus gives them away, doesn't allow them to get away with it. "And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile." But you need a little bit of technical knowledge to understand this. This was the provision in Roman law called the angarion, which is actually a Greek name, and it's derived from a Persian term. And by this law, any Roman soldier could require of any non-Roman citizen in an area governed by the Romans — which included all of Palestine at the time — would require of any non-Roman citizen that they carry their rucksack, their backpack, which was heavy, contained their equipment, their clothes, etc., for a thousand paces: what we call one mile, mille passus, a mile. But — and the Roman law was very strict on this — not one step longer. You would then have to, if you were a Roman soldier, find someone else if you wanted them to carry it. Why? Well, the Roman soldiers governed lots of places, and they were well aware that while they needed to impose burdens of taxation and so forth in order to keep their system going. They didn't want to provoke unnecessary hatred and violence amongst their subjects. So they had, for the time at least, relatively just laws concerning how much, exactly how much, they could demand of somebody. Now, if someone forces you to go one mile, at the moment that mile is over, that person's right over you stops. But if you go a second mile, you are actually inverting the power structure, because from then he strangely is entirely dependent on your generosity, because he's actually doing something illegal. He could at any time be stopped and would be punished for abusing you. You have completely reversed the power dynamic by going the second mile. So in each one of these, Jesus is saying: don't get caught into rivalry and vengeance. Allow yourself to have a completely different pattern of desire, even towards people who are harming you, because that's actually how you will undo their power from within. "Give to everyone who begs from you" — and this is not, curiously, doesn't use the word for beggars as in poor people, but for anyone who asks of you — "and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from them." Don't run away from these things. But therefore, if that's the case, well then I must think positively about how I'm going to approach these people. Get out of rivalry and vengeance. Now he moves on. "You have heard it said: you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy." Well, they may well have heard it said. It isn't of course exactly written like that anywhere. In fact, the relevant passages are again from Leviticus: "You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin. You shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord." Now, obviously, if it says "you shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin," the suggestion is if you hate anyone else, that's no problem. And naturally enough, the moment you do love your kin and your neighbour as yourself, you're creating an in-group, which tends to have an out-group which you do hate. So the whole question is: what are the limits of those people whom I can hate? Those people who are permissible for me not to love, not to avoid grudges and so on. And that this was a question alive in Jesus's time is shown by the question of the lawyer to him concerning who is my neighbour, where Jesus's answer was actually to bring a further point from the book of Leviticus, which is: "when an alien resides with you, you are to treat him as yourself; you shall love the alien as yourself." In other words, even within the book of Leviticus, the The tendency is to stretch out the in-group further than might be comfortable, and Jesus is saying this is the innermost core thing: that there should be no out-group. There should be no one out there whom you do not love. That's the purpose of the law. It's not so as to limit; it says to open you out ever further to finding more and more people who are your neighbor and fewer and fewer people who are your enemy, however much they hate you. So he says, "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." And I want to just stop here and say that I think this is one of the most important passages in all the Gospels, and one of the most demanding, one of the most difficult to understand, and absolutely central to understanding Jesus's relationship to us. Because with this we begin to understand what Jesus is about to undergo, which is traversing our hostility towards him and everything he stands for, out of love for us. For me, this is absolutely central to the Gospel. This is not a nice, wishy-washy extra to the Gospel. This is absolutely central to the Gospel. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Why pray for those who persecute you? Because in as far as you pray for them, you start to see them as God sees them, and you cease to be over against them, because God is not over against you or them or anyone else. God is not over against anyone at all, but towards all of us in the same way — and "in the same way" means overcoming our hostility. So, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." In other words, God's love does not depend on our goodness. The Gospel is not moralistic. The Gospel is about loving people in the midst of hostility. And that is an incredibly, incredibly difficult lesson for us to learn, because we would far rather that it be a question of moral rights and wrongs. And yet here we have absolutely the centre of the Gospel: "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you," with the assurance that Jesus is going thereafter to walk the walk of the talk that he has talked. "If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" Anyone can form a group of people like them and like each other. "And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Not even the Gentiles do the same." But being perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect means being over against nobody at all, being over against nothing at all. And that means learning not to be driven… not to be run by the evil that others may do to you. The way I sometimes say this is: don't let the bastards get to you. It's not the demand to be a floor cloth over whom people can walk. It's the far, far, far greater demand of learning to be, as God is towards us, someone who is endlessly loving and patient and kind towards us even when we are actively hostile to God in ways that we don't even understand — thinking that we need to grab things, bits of identity, of security, and therefore actually hurting God's plan the whole time. In as far as we begin to get a sense of loving in the midst of hostility, we begin to get a sense of God whose love traverses hostility so as to bring us into being. And I think that this is an extraordinary place for us to stop. "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" — a reference to "be holy even as I am holy." The holiness of God, the culmination of the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures, the whole of the Torah, being holy as God is holy: that's the purpose of the whole of Leviticus. Jesus is saying that's still exactly what this is about, but it's about undoing the whole world of rivalry and vengeance, which is the world of hostility to God. And: "I am prepared to walk into that, to traverse that hostility now for you, so that you can see what it looks like." And in as far as you do that, you too will be sons and daughters of God. This is the path that I'm calling you to. And I think that this is a very striking place for us to end ordinary time just before Lent, since over the next few weeks we will be watching Jesus walk the walk. He will be traversing hostility to show that love loves us not in as far as we are good or not, not in as far as we are on his side or not, but because he loves us even when — and even as — we are so often completely blind to quite how hostile we are, completely blind to the extent to which we live in a world of people like us, and with safe enemies who we can agree to hate. He's going to undo all that by traversing hostility. Love, and the opening out of Catholicity — the possibility of all, of everything being united — depends on this walking the walk through hostility, through rivalry and vengeance, so as to be towards others as our heavenly Father is. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.