The Wisdom of Those Who Are Mature, Sixth Sunday (A), February 12, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Bronx, NY
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
February 12, 2023
Sir 15:15-20, Ps 119, 1Cor 2:6-10, Mt 5:17-37

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Later tonight, over a billion people will tune in to behold human excellence on a field in Glendale Arizona. We will watch Andy Reid match wits with Nick Sirianni, Quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts match arms and legs, Tight End Travis Kelce clash for big-catch superiority against receivers AJ Brown and Devonta Smith, defensive stars Chris Jones and Nick Bolton go head to head with all-Pro linemen Lane Johnson and Jayson Kelce, and even kickers Harrison Butker and Jake Elliott compete at distance, accuracy and even over who gets the chance to kick a glorious game-winner. One of the perennial attractions of sports is that they’re a school in which we are formed in so many virtues and skills necessary for life: teamwork, self-discipline, asceticism, docility, selflessness, dependability, perseverance, focus, preparation and training, poise under pressure, sportsmanship, how to celebrate and how to handle setbacks. Sports can bring people together in common purpose, whether we’re dealing with high schools, universities, huge geographical regions, or, in the Olympics and World Cup, whole nations. Sports have also proven to be culturally and historically far more than just games, expediting processes of racial integration and the overcoming of warring tensions.
• Jesus came from heaven to earth to form a team and he’s drafted each of us not to be a spectator, but to play. To use the analogy of football, some will be star quarterbacks and receivers, others will be hardworking lineman, nose tackles and linebackers, others will be special teamers, coaches, video editors, trainers even water boys. But we all have an important role in helping the team win not just momentary earthly renown but an imperishable eternal crown. But we need to have the same drive for excellence as we see in professional athletes, demonstrated not just when the cameras are on, but as they hit the weight room, stretch, study film, eat and sleep. We likewise need to receive good coaching all along the way.
• In today’s readings, Jesus, our head coach, summons us toward excellence. Members of the divine coaching staff, Sirach, David and Paul, all help us to recognize that real spiritual greatness is within our grasp and give us key tips on what we need to seize it. So let’s listen attentively to this coaching that is meant to help us, together, toward the only hall of fame that really matters.
• Paul speaks to us about what type of coaching we’ll receive and follow. There are, he says, two types of wisdom. The first is the “wisdom of this age” which is “doomed to perish.” It comes from coaches who will never win anything lasting. The other, he says, is the wisdom of the “mature,” namely, “God’s wisdom,” which is “secret and hidden” to the so-called clever of any epoch, but will lead us to “what no eye has seen, no ear heard, nor any human heart conceived.” It is what “God has revealed” to those of us who “love him.” Jesus’ coaching, as we will see, is far different from those in the world, but is the path to true spiritual maturity, to full stature as a human being and a Christian.
• Sirach in the first reading focuses on whether we will choose to live by divine wisdom. He tell us, “If you choose, you can keep the commandments. To act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand to whichever you choose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.” In other words, God has made us free, free to accept his wisdom or free to reject it, free to choose to burn in fire, or free to live according to the cool, living water of our baptism. Will we choose to follow the coaching Jesus gives, recognizing that it is a choice between fire and water, between winning and losing, between eternal life and death?
• In the responsorial psalm, we focus on hunger, on desire, on the will we need to use our freedom to follow God’s wisdom. It speaks about those who “seek [the Lord] with all their heart,” who firmly “walk in the law of the Lord,” who ask the Lord to “instruct me in the way of your statutes” and to “give me discernment that I may observe your law and keep it with all my heart.”
• All of these insights about true wisdom, freedom and desire lead us to what Jesus tells us in the Gospel, where with great candor he describes the standards of behavior that are meant to distinguish Christians from the virtuous pagans who love those who love them and even the most religiously observant Jews, like the Scribes and Pharisees. After speaking to us in the last two weeks about becoming like him in living the beatitudes so that we might be truly salt of the earth and light of the world, this week and next Jesus will set out seven ways that as his disciples our holiness is supposed to surpass others’. Today we will encounter the first five of the seven; next Sunday we will tackle the final two. But in each of them, Jesus is calling us, like him, to “fulfill the law and the prophets,” to become “great in his kingdom” by acting on these principles and teaching others to do the same. It’s a coaching that comes from the one who invented human life and therefore we should receive it with even greater docility than if we were being coached in football by Bill Belichick or Vince Lombardi. In each of them, he will take us far beyond actions to the thoughts and desires that motivate our actions, so that he can ultimately make us not only those who don’t do the wrong thing, and not even those who do the right thing, but those who do the right thing for the right reason, and who can become coaches of others helping them toward the same excellence.
• The first standard Jesus teaches us involves the 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 with our hearts or tongues either. The first standard is not to do no harm to our neighbor — even the virtuous pagans recognized that — but truly to love our neighbor like Christ loves us.
• 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 theirs. “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 sufficient 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 whether others have something against us. If they do, Jesus 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. So the second standard is to be reconciling, to be peacemakers and not just peacewishers, to be merciful like God is merciful, just as Christ came into the world mercifully to reconcile all things to the Father.
• 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. Jesus states: “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 sacramentally married 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 souls, committing adultery in their heart even with hundreds or thousands of women on a given night. Girls or women who lustfully fantasize, who indulge in racy books like 50 Shades of Gray and other works of the genre, likewise commit adultery in their heart. This is a challenging standard today in a pornified culture that treats sexual sin as a rite of passage and lust as a given. Lust, however, 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, someone who, as he says in the Beatitudes, sees God in others and reverences him in them. To try to become great as a human being while becoming a slave of lust is less likely that a lazy, Doritos-pounding couch potato becoming a professional athlete. Jesus calls us to be excellent in terms of purity and love and by means of prayer, self-discipline, the sacrament of confession and other graces, he will give us the help we need to get there. But we have to desire it and use our freedom to live by his holy wisdom.
• The fourth standard is about the indissolubility of marriage. Jesus reminds us that his approach to the gift of marriage is different from the way most others regard it, because his standards are the only ones consistent with how he designed marriage in the beginning. 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 God 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 endangering the family through various destructive vices. 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. Even many Christian Churches have caved in. 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. Today on World Marriage Sunday, the Sunday before St. Valentine’s Day, it’s an opportunity to focus on the blessing of marriage, to pray for married couples, and to pray for all those who have received the vocation to marriage, that they may model their bond not on the no-fault-divorce notions of the world or the redefining tendencies of the culture and the courts, but on the way Christ faithfully, indissolubly and fruitfully loves his Bride the Church.
• 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 behaving like people who, to be believed, have to say, “I swear to God,” “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” Jesus wants our “yes” to be “yes” and our “no” to be “no.” We live in a culture that lies all the time, with politicians like George Santos who totally invent a resumé, with press spokesmen who spin rather than tell the truth, with students who plagiarize, with many who don’t keep their word and promises or who say only what they think others want to hear. Jesus tells us that everything other than total sincerity and honesty comes 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.
• We will take up in next week’s Gospel the two other things Jesus says that are meant to distinguish us from others: how we’re supposed to offer no resistance to one who is evil by turning the other cheek and how we’re to love even our enemies and pray for our persecutors. These sixth and seventh standards of the truly Christian life are even more challenging than what we’ve heard today and obviously will set us apart from virtuous pagans and righteous Jews. But they will help us to become like Jesus, “perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect,” true champions of life who are the world’s true heroes.
• To help us live by the high standards of Christian excellence he sets out for us, Jesus gives us the greatest help of all, himself, the Word-made-flesh, with which he feeds us at Mass. Just as throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus interiorizes the law, so in order to redeem us, Jesus didn’t want to remain outside of us, but chose to come inside, so that from the inside he can help us adopt his thoughts, his desires, and his will so that deeds of true Christian love can flow from our interior bond with him. That is what happens here in Holy Communion. This is the meal of champions. This is the food of the saints. Let us therefore turn to Jesus and ask him to give us the help to live up to high standards, to purify our thoughts, our eyes, our hearts, our relationships, our commitments, and our speech, so that together with our reconciled Christian brothers and sisters on his team, we may come to see what eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor the human heart even imagined, the full blessedness he has in store, in this life and in the next, for those eternal hall of famers who freely choose to live by his wisdom and walk in his holy ways.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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