Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 15, 2020

February 15, 20208 min read

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Vigil
February 15, 2020

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 joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday.
Every three years we have the chance to ponder at Sunday Mass Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We begin with the Beatitudes, which, because of the Feast of the Presentation, we did not hear this year. Then, last week, we ponder our identity as Salt of the Earth and Light of the World. This Sunday we get into the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus calls us to live by a special set of Christian standards, a higher set of principles than the norms of the good pagans who love those who love them and higher than the standards even of the most observant Jews. Unless our holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus stresses, we will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. So the stakes can’t be higher and what he’s going to tell us is too important to ignore.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets out seven different ways that as his disciples our holiness is supposed to surpass others’. He gives us five this Sunday and the final two next week. These marks of Christian behavior go beyond merely keeping the natural law or the Ten Commandments. They are meant to transform our heart and our whole life from the inside out. They challenge us not just to be “good” but genuinely “holy.” All are challenging, but we need to remember that by calling us to these high standards of ordinary Christian living, Jesus is showing us an exhilarating confidence that we, together with his help, can live up to them.
The first standard Jesus teaches us this Sunday involves the whole way we treat others. He says that it’s not enough for us not to murder someone. We need to refrain also from the thoughts that set us on the path to maim and murder our brothers. He tells us, “If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.’” We are called, in short, to love others from our heart and head outward. We don’t love others if all we do is not kill them. If we’re envious, jealous, uncomplimentary, or vengeful within, we’re still not loving them. To enter into his kingdom, to become holy, we can’t kill without hearts or tongues either.
The second standard to which Jesus calls us is to make the first move in reconciling ourselves with those from whom we have been alienated either by our sins or their sins. “When you are offering your gift at the altar,” he tells us, “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Jesus is saying to us that it’s not enough for us to be merely “good with God,” we also have to be “good with others.” When we come to pray and ask God’s forgiveness, we must examine first others have something against us. If they do, he tells us that we need to make the first move and go to reconcile, even if we have been the one aggrieved, just like God made the first move in reconciling us when we had sinned against him.
The third standard to which Jesus calls us is truly to be pure of heart. It is not enough for us not to commit adultery in the flesh, he says. We need to avoid the thoughts that lead to adultery. “I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus implies that even spouses can be adulterers with each other if they allow lust for each other to invade their marriage. But this standard of purity applies to everyone. Those who use pornography or give into lustful thoughts become serial adulterers in their heart. Lust, as St. John Paul II taught, changes the entire intentionality of a human person from a giver to a taker, from a protector to a predator, from someone who sacrifices his own desires for another’s good to someone who consumes another for his or her own gratification. Jesus wants us, rather, to become truly pure of heart, and with prayer, self-discipline, the sacrament of confession, and grace, he will help us.
The fourth standard is about the indissolubility of marriage. Jesus says, “Anyone who divorces his wife causes her to commit adultery; whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” Later on he explains why, because in marriage God joins a man and a woman for the rest of their life in one flesh, and what he has joined, not even all the family court judges in the world can divide. Some may tragically need, for legal reasons, to seek a divorce, to protect themselves or their children from an abusive spouse or one who is behaving in such a way, like foolishly wasting joint resources, that the future of children is put at risk, or for some other truly serious reason. But that civil action of divorce doesn’t break the one-flesh union created by God, which lasts until death. It’s easy for us to try to dismiss Jesus’ standards and live by Liz Taylor’s. Many in our culture do. But we need to open ourselves to the help God gives men and women to remain faithful to the covenant with each other and with God in poverty or prosperity, in sickness and health, in good times and in worse times, all the days of their life.
The final standard Jesus mentions this Sunday is about our truthfulness. He tells us that we’re not to take oaths, because we should be so transparently truthful that we have no need. Rather than people who have to say, “I swear to God,” “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye” to be believed, Jesus wants our “yes” to be “yes” and our “no” to be “no.” We live in the midst of a culture that lies all the time, of politicians or press spokesmen who spin rather than tell the truth, of others who say what they think others want to hear but who don’t keep their word and promises. Jesus says that everything other than total sincerity and honesty is from the devil, the father of lies. Jesus, who is the truth incarnate, wants his followers to be distinguished as people who never tell lies, whose word is immediately believed because we would rather die than lie. Jesus calls us to a standard of full-time truthfulness and transparency and will help us courageously keep it.
Next week we will take up the two other things Jesus says that are meant to distinguish us from others, which are perhaps the most challenging of all: how we’re supposed to respond to those who treat us in an evil way by turning the other cheek and how we’re to love even our enemies and pray for our persecutors.
But in preparation for this Sunday, we remember that Jesus came to fulfill the law of God and to help us to fulfill it. He wants his conversation with us this Sunday to be truly consequential. If we hear and heed what he’s asking, and respond to the help he gives, especially in the Holy Eucharist and Confession, he will help us to become through what he teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, more and more like him.