Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 19, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
February 19, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when Jesus will speak to us about the most revolutionary and challenging part of his teaching, what distinguishes Christianity from every other religion and moral philosophy: his command to love even our enemies. Jesus calls us to do far more than merely tolerate those who oppose us or not be subsumed with a spirit of revenge toward them. He calls us to lovethem, to do good to them when they hate us, to bless them when they curse us, to pray for them when they mistreat us, to turn the other cheek when they slap us first, to give our undergarments to those who take our coats and ultimately to be willing to die for them. In doing so, Jesus is trying to help us to learn how to be like him, to love others as he has loved us first, to act in accordance with his image and likeness in which we were created. He tells us that if we do so, we will be “children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” We will become “merciful, just as also [our] Father is merciful.” He says that if we live by this standard, if we measure out in this way, “gifts will be given to [us], a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing will be poured into [our] lap,” not necessarily of course by the persecutors but by God himself.
• We learn from Jesus how to live this Gospel. He loves those who don’t love him and even those who have made themselves his enemies through sin. He blesses those who curse him and blaspheme against him. He gives and gives and gives, and forgives, forgives and forgives. We see this Gospel put into practice in all its clarity on Good Friday, as Jesus prayed to the Father to forgive his executioners, those who were mocking him, and all those whose sins were bringing about his expiatory death, “for they know not what they are doing.” When the soldiers of the High Priest or the Roman guards slapped him on one cheek, Jesus could have easily annihilated them by his power of God, but he didn’t fight back, because he loved those who were harming him and didn’t want to harm them back. When they stripped him of his cloak, he allowed them to strip him of his tunic as well. When they bid him to walk on the road to Calvary, he walked a second mile. In all of this, Jesus tells us, “Come, follow me!” He wants us to be distinguished from all the rest by the way we, as Christians, love everyone like he does, including those who don’t love us. “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same.” When he tells us, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” he is ultimately saying, “love others with the same forgiving love with which you would want to be loved by others.”
• In all of this, Jesus is calling us to live by 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 as the old adage goes, 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 Christians to a much 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.
• 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. 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. Rather it’s we who refuse to let his unconditional love live in us and grow. Our failure to love others impacts our receptivity to God’s love. 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 by loving others unconditionally. 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 his love!
• Let’s finish by making three clarifications.
• First, the word Jesus uses for love is agape, not philia (the love between friends) or eros (the love between a husband or wife). Agape means unconquerable benevolence, that no matter what others do to us, we keep loving, we don’t descend by vengeance to their level of hatred, but seek to unite the experience to God and to respond with and like God. Jesus is not calling us to likeour enemies, to hang with them, or to have warm, fuzzy feelings about them. But he is calling us never to stop wishing them well, never to stop doing them good, never to stop praying for them and their conversion, and never to stop asking God to forgive them.
• Second, part of unconquerable benevolence toward even our enemies involves trying to stop them from whatever evil they’re doing. We wouldn’t love someone if we enable him to continue to behave in a way that does harm to others and immeasurably damages their soul. We don’t love an alcoholic by buying him a bottle of Bourbon. We don’t love terrorists by permitting them to continue to commit atrocities. We intervene. We stop them. But we do so out of love, not vengeance.
• The third clarification builds on the first two. Loving enemies doesn’t entail loving them to the exclusion of loving our family members, friends, and fellow citizens. We have to protect them. It would be a failure of love of neighbor not to defend them. The principle of legitimate self-defense and the principles underlying the doctrine of just war are based on this two-fold protection. Love of neighbor doesn’t mean allowing armed robbers to attack our family members or terrorists to take the lives of innocent victims, because that would show a failure to love both those intending to do harm as well as their intended victims.
• The place where we learn how to love our enemies and put on God’s love is the Mass, where we enter into Jesus’ own prayer of mercy. The Mass is the “good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, … poured into [our] lap,” giving us the standard by which to measure out anew to others. It is where we’re strengthened to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, and to love by Christ’s measure. It’s where Christ from the inside helps us to live and love by his standard. On Sunday, let us ask for that grace.

The Gospel passage on which this homily is based is: 

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