HOMILY WEEK 11 02 – Year II
Living the Law of Love
(1 Kg 21:17-29; 51; Mt 5:43-48)
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The readings today are like a two-act play, conveying the message to love others as Jesus has loved us, by being as merciful as the Father is merciful.
Elijah and King Ahab in the first reading mirror the events with Nabob and King David, after David also committed murder and stole the wife of Uriah. Like David, Ahab repents from the heart for his complicity in the murder of an innocent man, God has mercy on him, and the certainly well-deserved punishment is deferred.
The psalm is the famed Miserere, an acknowledgement of guilt and a cry for mercy, attributed to King David, whose experience of the unconditional love of God as forgiveness transformed him into the only true King Israel ever had.
The Gospel acclamation and the Gospel combine to provide the second act: we are to love others the same way the Father loves us – perfectly and mercifully.
What Jesus gives us in this gospel transcends all the laws of Old Testament that were largely based on the Law of Talion – “eye for eye,” “tit-for-tat” as we saw in yesterday’s readings. We are to “be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” The gospel of Luke puts it more accurately as a call to be merciful, just as our heavenly Father is merciful. That means to forgive from the heart over and over again (seventy-seven times) and to seek to understand the other rather than judge or punish the other.
Psychologists offer us three options when confronted with danger: fight, flee or freeze. Some would add a forth option, “fawn” – being a people pleaser. If we are angry people, we will fight back; if we are fearful people, we will either flee in all kinds of ways, or just freeze our emotions and do nothing. Jesus today offers us a fifth option – forgive, but that takes lots of strong faith.
That also poses the question – how do we forgive our enemies? In Matthew 18:15 and following, Jesus teaches us how to love our enemies by forgiving them. Instead of reacting to hurt in kind by fighting, fleeing, freezing or fawning, we can go to those who hurt us and share with them how we feel about their hurtful actions. In so doing, we are keeping the commandment to love ourselves by honoring our own emotions, and then loving our enemies by sharing our feelings with them without any attempt at revenge or punishment. That is the key – to let go of all expectation and just share the emotions with love as a way of forgiving them. We can even thank them for giving us the opportunity to grow personally and spiritually. To top it all off, we can do as Jesus said, and pray for them, what we would want for ourselves. That is truly being merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful.
Speaking at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, John Allen Jr. spoke about the research he was doing for a new book on the persecution of Christians around the world. He mentioned an enthusiastic, vibrant Kenyan woman he met whose family was killed by terrorists. When asked how she could be so positive in the light of what happened to her family, she replied firmly, “My greatest treasure is my faith in Jesus, who taught us the way of forgiveness. They took away most of my family – there is no way I was going to let them take away my faith.”
The Eucharist puts us in intimate contact with Jesus, and his mercy. May our celebration empower us to live his new commandment: love one another as he has loved us, by being merciful as our Heavenly Father is merciful.
