The Surpassing Righteousness of Christ-like Merciful Love, 10th Thursday (II), June 14, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for Harmony
June 14, 2018
1 Kings 18:41-46, Ps 65, Mt 5:20-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order.  The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. The fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable.
• But they were missing something. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.
• When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he’s not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling it; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do.
• Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us. It’s not enough merely not to kill others. He doesn’t want us to insult them. He doesn’t want us to hate them. Jesus wants to teach us to love those whom others would be tempted even to murder, to love those who make us angry, to love those who are fools. And that’s the type of offering God wants us to give him when we come to worship him. That’s what we see in the second part of today’s Gospel. Jesus says, “Therefore” — linking both parts and this is key for us to grasp as we come here today to pray the Mass — “if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” The type of offering God wants from us is the offering of love, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of kindness, toward his beloved sons and daughters who are our blood or spiritual brothers and sisters. He recognizes that murder begins in the heart, with resentment, with fear, with vengeance, with lack of harmony. If love for others is lacking, he says, our offering to God is in vain. We can’t come to receive the gift God wants to give us if we’ve closed our hearts to the way he wants us to live. Ultimately the offering God calls us to make when we come before him is our “logike latreia” (Rom 12:2), the only worship that makes sense, our bodies, our entire lives, as a holy and acceptable oblation. It’s to put ourselves at God’s total service. And if we refuse to reconcile, then we are not at God’s service. If we’re not loving our neighbor, we’re really not loving God. Our approach to those who have something against us must be similar to the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son who was always seeking to reconcile with his son who had squandered everything: that’s the approach we should have toward reconciliation when we have been wronged; the response we have when we’ve done the wrongdoing is obviously straightforward, one of humble contrition. If we think, however, we can just focus on God without reconciling with our neighbor, Jesus is telling us today the absolute opposite, and giving us a choice between the “kingdom of heaven” and a “prison” from which we will not be released until we have paid the last penny. This type of reconciliation with others, this type of fraternal, faithful love, was what many Scribes and Pharisees refused to do. They condescendingly disdained their neighbor who didn’t live as outwardly righteous lives as they did. They disparaged the Gentiles as if their entire bodies were meant just to be fuel for the fires of Gehenna. That’s why for many of them their worship was in vain because they refused to allow God to transform them into his loving, merciful image and likeness.
• Overcoming our tendency to judge our brother, to hate him, to refuse forgiveness, to insult him, isn’t easy. It’s a persevering challenge. God can change us on a dime if we give him permission, but normally he heals us gradually so that he can strengthen our will in the process. We see a sign of this in today’s first reading. Elijah seeks to do good to King Ahab, who with his wife Jezebel had been persecuting him and all the prophets of the Lord seeking to put them to death. They blamed Elijah and the prophets for the year-long drought and famine they were enduring. Elijah had just defeated all of the priests of Ba’al and, instead of turning on Ahab, he prophesied to him: “Get up, eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain.” That was an act of pure faith that the rain of God was coming. Elijah climbed to the top of Mt. Carmel to pray. He sent his servant a young boy to “climb up and look out to sea” for any sign of rain. The young man climbed up and looked and saw totally blue skies. He asked him to go a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth, fifth and sixth. Finally on the seventh time, the boy returned reporting to Elijah, “There is a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea.” And soon thereafter “the sky grew dark with clouds and wind and a heavy rain fell.” Elijah sent his servant to tell Ahab to get moving before the rains would make it impossible for his chariot to move. He was doing good to those who were persecuting him, loving those who had made themselves his enemies. This is the justice to which God calls us, the righteousness with God and others that is truly Christian.
• As we pray this Mass, we remember that we’re coming to give ourselves as gifts before the Lord as he gives himself to us. He entered our world to reconcile us to himself, even though he had never wronged us, but we had wronged him. He made the first move. He gives the total gift of his love. And he tells us, as we receive that gift, do this in memory of me. Let’s open ourselves up to the gift of Jesus in Holy Communion and the gift of the Holy Spirit whom he will send us together with the Father so that we might by God’s own power do what God commands and have our righteousness not only surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, but arrive to the full measure of the justice of Christ by Christ’s own interior help.

The readings for today’s Mass were: