Living By Jesus’ Standards, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), February 23, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the MIssionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
February 23, 2025
1 Sam 26:2.7-9.12-13.22-23, Ps 103, 1 Cor 15:45-59, Lk 6:27-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

Today Jesus continues the very clear and challenging homily he began seven days ago. Last week, he stressed how different is the path that leads to true happiness, to holiness, to heaven from what men and women normally believe. Whereas the world says you have to be rich to be happy, to be the life of the party, to fulfill every earthly desire and appetite and to be spoken well of by everyone, Jesus says, rather, blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger for things beyond their earthly appetites, who weep out of concern for others and for one’s sins, and who are persecuted and reviled on account of their faith. The Lord presented us a choice, a fork in the road between the “wide path” the world says will lead to beatitude and the narrow, uphill way that he himself indicated and he himself trod. The one who himself was so poor that he didn’t have a pillow on which to lay his head, who wept over Jerusalem and her repeated rejection of God’s offer of love, who fasted for 40 days living off of “every word that fell from the mouth of God” and who was persecuted and maltreated until death, heads up the narrow path to eternal happiness and turns to us and says “follow me!” (Lk 9:58; 19:41; Mt 4:4). 

Today Jesus continues to point us to the way that leads to life with him and away from the populated path presented by the world. Jesus’ path is challenging. In the Gospel antiphon today, Jesus gives us again his “new commandment,” to “love one another as I have loved you” and in the Gospel itself, he tells us clearly the standard of love by which he lived and by which each of us is called to live. 

• He who loved his enemies enough to give his life for them and prayed that the Father would forgive those who were mocking and crucifying him told us that to be truly his disciples we, too, need to love our enemies, to do good those who hate us, bless those who curse us and to pray for those who abuse us. 
• He who turned the other cheek when the Roman soldiers were beating and scourging him and who did not withhold his tunic from those who were stripping him, commanded us, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from the one who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt.” 
• He who gave his body and blood down the very last drop challenged us to give to everyone who begs of us and if anyone takes our goods, not to ask for them again. 

In all of these imperatives, Jesus was not telling us, merely, “Do what I say,” but rather, “follow me.” He calls us to love as he did, to love those who don’t love us, to give to those who don’t give to us, to bless those who curse us. He calls us to make the first move, to do to others what we would want them to do to us, regardless of any consideration of what they in fact have done or failed to do to us. He calls us to a higher standard. He calls us, in fact, to his standard. The standard of most in the world is reciprocity. We generally try to treat well those who treat us well; if others treat us poorly, we feel justified in doing the same to them. But living by the principle of an “eye for an eye” just leaves the whole world blind. Christ calls us to look on others with the eyes of God the Father, who is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Jesus tells us that if we love only those who love us, if we do good only to those who are good to us, if we give only to those who give to us, then we are no different from everyone else, whom Jesus very clearly calls “sinners.” The human notion of “justice,” of “quid pro quo” is not enough. Jesus calls us to a higher standard, the standard of God the Father, to be merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful, even and especially when others do not deserve it. This is what love really is, doing what is best for the other at all times, even when the other does not reciprocate it, or appreciate it, or even acknowledge it. 

We see an illustration of this type of living by a higher standard in today’s first reading when David, after having been hunted down by King Saul and his assassins, was presented with an opportunity to kill the one who was seeking to kill him. David’s soldiers advised him to take advantage of the opportunity to kill Saul while he was sleeping, saying “God has given your enemy into your hand.” But David was not looking at the situation with their eyes, but with God’s. Even though his life would have been made so much easier if Saul were dead, even though he might have been able to justify killing him in self-defense, David replied, “Who can raise his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” Although Saul was committing evil against David, David wouldn’t descend to that level of evil. Instead, he treated Saul with mercy. Saul, experiencing that mercy, changed. As we see later in the First Book of Samuel, Saul repented of the evil he was planning to do and David and Saul were reconciled. 

All of us are called to act in a similar way. Even when people are treating us badly, speaking ill of us, trying to harm us, even if some are — God forbid! — trying to hunt us down and to kill us, Jesus calls us to remember like David that each of those malefactors is made in his image and likeness. If they’re Christians, they, too, have been anointed by God through the sacraments, no matter how far they have fallen from the graces they received. Like David, none of us can raise our hand against one of God’s children and be guiltless. If we, like David, refuse to descend to their level but rather treat them with mercy and try to raise them up to our level, to Christ’s level, then they, like Saul, may convert. Said in another way, others may consider us THEIR enemies — just like some made Christ their enemy — but Christ calls us not to consider them OUR enemies, but rather to love them, to do good to them, to bless them, to pray for them, and to forgive them. This is the way we make the transition from the “old Adam” that St. Paul talks about in the second reading to the “new Adam,” from one who lives by worldly standards to one who lives by Christ’s standards. 

But Jesus doesn’t stop merely by calling us to live up the standard he himself lived and told us to follow. He then says something absolutely breathtaking: that we, for our part, SET THE STANDARD by which we want GOD to treat us. “The measure with which you measure,” Jesus declares, “will be measured back to you.” If we’re merciful to others, God will be merciful to us. If we forgive, we’ll be forgiven. If we’re generous with others, God will be generous with us and bless us abundantly with “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over… put into [our] lap.” Jesus says that there will be a correspondence between our actions and God’s, for good or for bad. “For if you forgive others their trespasses,” he says in St. Matthew’s Gospel, “your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt 6:14). The Father will treat us by the standard we adopt. If we wish to be forgiven by him, we must forgive others. If we wish not to be condemned by him, then we must not condemn others. If we wish to be loved by him even when we sin against Him, then we must love others even when they sin against us. 

So there are two standards. The first is the standard Christ sets for us. The second is the standard we set for God. God loves us with unconditional love and calls us to love others with unconditional love. If we choose, however, to love others conditionally — to do good only to those who are good to us, to forgive only some, to condemn those who we think deserve it, to retaliate when someone harms us — then Jesus tells us that that is the measure we will receive. This truth is not an exception to God’s unconditional love for us; he still loves us even when we are “ungrateful and wicked” and never wishes to condemn us. It is, in fact, one of the supreme illustrations of the Father’s unconditional love or us, that he gave us the freedom to choose to reject that love. When we do, it’s not that he no longer loves us unconditionally, but rather we refuse to let his unconditional love live in us and grow. We refuse to receive what he wants to give us. That is why the measure we measure out to others will be measured back to us: the only way for us to receive the full measure of God’s unconditional love, to have our laps filled to overflowing with his graces, is by our opening ourselves up to receive them loving others unconditionally. If we don’t live according to Christ’s standard of love, if we don’t sacrifice for those who hate us, bless those who curse us, do good to those who mistreat us and forgive those who wrong us, then we close ourselves off to God’s greatest blessing. The only way we can experience those blessings is by following Christ along the narrow, uphill, challenging path of real self-giving love. Christ calls us to live by his standard of love precisely so that in doing so we will be able to receive from the Father in return the full measure of the his love! 

As we continue to pray for our Holy Father, Pope Francis, during this very precarious time, we can profit from some of his thoughts on these readings given in Angelus messages three years ago. 

He told us, “In the Gospel of today’s Liturgy, Jesus gives some basic life guidance to the disciples. The Lord refers to the most difficult situations, those that constitute the bench test for us, those that confront us with those who are enemies and hostile to us, those who are always trying to do us harm. In such cases, the disciple of Jesus is called not to give in to instinct and hatred, but to go further, much further. To go beyond instinct, to go beyond hatred. … It seems that the Lord is asking for the impossible. … If one does not react to bullies, then every abuse of power is given free rein, and this is not fair. But is it really so? Does the Lord really ask for the impossible and indeed even unjust things of us?”

“Let us consider first and foremost that sense of injustice that we feel in “turning the other cheek”. … During the passion, in his unjust trial before the high priest, at one point [Jesus] receives a slap from one of the guards. And how does He react? He does not insult him, no: he says to the guard, “If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” (Jn 18:23). He asks for an account of the wrong done to him. Turning the other cheek does not mean suffering in silence, giving in to injustice. With his question, Jesus denounces what is unjust. But he does so without anger, without violence, indeed with kindness. He does not wish to spark off an argument, but rather to defuse resentment, this is important: to extinguish hatred and injustice together, seeking to restore the guilty brother. This is not easy, but Jesus did it and he tells us to do likewise. This is turning the other cheek: Jesus’ meekness is a stronger response than the slap he received. Turning the other cheek is not the withdrawal of the loser, but the action of one who has a greater inner strength. Turning the other cheek means defeating evil with  goodness which opens up a breach in the heart of the enemy, unmasking the absurdity of his hatred. And this attitude, this turning the other cheek, is dictated not by calculation or by hatred, but by love. It is the freely given, undeserved love we receive from Jesus that generates in the heart a way of doing things that is similar to his, that rejects all vengeance.“

“Let’s get to another objection: is it possible for a person to come to love his or her enemies? If it depended only on us, it would be impossible. But let us recall that … the Lord never asks for something he has not already given us first. When he tells me to love my enemies, he wants to give me the capacity to do so. … Saint Augustine prayed in this way: … Lord, “give what You command, and command what You will” (Confessions , X, 29.40), because you have already given it to me. What should we ask of him? What is God happy to give us? The strength to love, which is not a thing, but rather the Holy Spirit. The strength to love is the Holy Spirit, and with the Spirit of Jesus, we can respond to evil with good, we can love those who do us harm. This is what Christians do.” 

In 2019, he elaborated on how Jesus sought to give us what we need to live this way. 

Jesus, he said, “is well aware that loving enemies exceeds our possibilities, but this is why he became man: not to leave us as we are, but to transform us into men and women capable of a greater love, that of his Father and ours. … With him, thanks to his love, to his Spirit, we are able to love even those who do not love us, even those who do us harm. In this way, Jesus wants God’s love to triumph over hatred and rancour in every heart. The logic of love, which culminates in Christ’s Cross, is a Christian’s badge and induces us to meet everyone with the heart of brothers and sisters. … Those who hear Jesus, who make an effort to follow him even at a cost, become children of God, and begin to truly resemble the Father who is in heaven. We become capable of things we never thought we could say or do, and of which we would have been rather ashamed, but which now give us joy and peace instead. We no longer need to be violent, with words and gestures: we discover that we are capable of tenderness and goodness; and we sense that all of this comes not from ourselves but from him!”

As we pray for the health of the Holy Father, let us pray, too, for him and us to be able to live by these standards of Jesus. 

To help us live up to them, Jesus gives us himself. He not only does not want us to compare ourselves to others but to himself and live according to his model, but at the same time gives us himself so that together with him we may live up to that very high standard. To help us love others as he has loved us, he gives himself to us as the Sacrament of Love in the Holy Eucharist, so that we might “do this in memory of” him. This is the means by which we enter into his Passion and are trained to respond as he did to those who slapped, stripped, beat, mocked and crucified him. This is the way he makes us true children of our Heavenly Father. 

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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