Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Chesterton was at the height of his literary career about ninety years ago. He took a serious look at his relationship with God and asked to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps you might remember from your school days that Chesterton loved to coin phrases that at first glance were humorous, but on further thought were really quite deep.  One of my favorites is: The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting but that it has not been tried[1].

Perhaps the most difficult of all of Christ's commands are those which are expounded in today's gospel, from the Sermon on the Mount.  You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you[2].

All of us, beginning with myself, are inclined to think that Jesus doesn't really mean us when we have been assaulted, or when someone humiliates us or mocks us, or when someone pushes our buttons in such a way that we are thrown into emotional turmoil. With the continual exploitation of our emotions by the media, the non stop presentation of the terrors of life in the news, we are tempted to think that certainly when the Lord says Forgive them or Love them he cannot be referring to the terrible people of the world who commit heinous crimes.  Furthermore, with the amount of violence we are exposed to on the media, we are inclined to feel a great gratification when the evil suffer injury. "What goes around comes around" we are very satisfied in saying. Of course, we are not so excited by the true meaning of this statement: Those who do evil should suffer evil. There is something within us that believes that real justice is in the law of talons: an eye for an eye. In reality, we would rather live in an Old Testament world, a world without Christ, than live in a world where we are expected to sacrifice our desire for vengeance to the Lord's command to love our enemies.  Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been tried and found difficult.

Perhaps it is for these reasons, perhaps it is for other reasons that many Catholics have quite a bit of difficulty with the Church's position opposing capital punishment. The popes have spoken out numerous times against capital punishment. The Bishops of the United States voiced their opposition to Capital punishment as a unified body over thirty years ago. It would be helpful for us to recall this statement and the justifications for their arguments. Back in November of 1980 the Bishops noted that Catholic teaching historically has accepted the principle that the state has the right to take the life of a person guilty of an extremely serious crime and that the state has the right to protect itself and its citizens from grave harm. However, they wrote, in the contemporary American society, the legitimate purposes of punishment no longer justifies the imposition of the death penalty. The legitimate purposes of punishment are deterrence, reform and retribution. The death penalty was reinstated in 1967.  The soaring number of murders in our country since then shows that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent. The criminal who is put to death, obviously, cannot reform even if this reform were to be limited to whatever contributions that criminal could make from a prison cell. Finally, retribution refers to the repayment of stolen property. No amount of retribution can replace the life of the victim.

It is right here that today's gospel hits home. People tend to confuse retribution with vengeance. Most people, Catholic and non Catholic, support the death penalty not to protect society, but to inflict vengeance upon the criminal. Time and again we hear the arguments: this person has caused so much pain to the victim and to his or her families that he does not deserve to live. Or "I know my slain son or daughter will rest easier once the criminal is killed." Or, "As long as the criminal is alive, I will never feel that this matter is put to rest."

In this highly charged emotional atmosphere, we have to stand strongly behind the principle that all life is sacred, even that of a terrible criminal. The Church cannot at one moment mount a mammoth campaign to respect life in the fight against abortion and at the same time ignore the fact that here in the twenty-first century we are still eliminating life in the name of justice. One of the great gifts of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the saintly departed Archbishop of Chicago, is the doctrine of the seamless garment. Basically, this doctrine states that we have to be consistent and support all human life. There is no seam in the garment, no line where the justification for eliminating human life changes[3].

I know that there are some who read this who are thinking that I am taking a liberal position regarding capital punishment. No, I am taking the position of the Catholic Church. The Church does not choose liberal or conservative positions. The Church proclaims the truth and liberals or conservatives decide if this fits into their own agendas.

Perhaps the most difficult words we pray today and every day are those words found in the Lord's Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. That archaic word, trespass, means to cross the line. When we say the Our Father we are saying that we will forgive those who cross the line of common decency so that we also might be forgiven for any ways that we have crossed the line. If we refuse to forgive, if we demand the law of talons, an eye for an eye, if we desire vengeance more than Christ's presence, then we are refusing to accept Jesus Christ himself.

Christianity is continually reforming itself. Christian society must continually scrutinize its actions to see if it is living up to the standards set by the Lord. Consider slavery. It took almost nineteen hundred years for Christians to recognize that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. It will take many more years for Christians to eliminate the various ways the law of talons has been embedded into our culture. But the standard is there. The standard for what is Christian and what is not Christian is the Law of the New Kingdom, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Word of God.

G. K. Chesterton certainly had it right: The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting but that it has not been tried.  Christ never said that following Him would be easy. Nor did he say that His followers would ever enjoy the majority position. Jesus just said that He would be with us always. That is worth every sacrifice, even the sacrifice of our deepest, darkest desires ■

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[1] Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) better known as G.K. Chesterton, was an English writer, lay theologian, poet, dramatist, journalist, orator, literary and art critic, biographer, and Christian apologist. Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox."

[2] 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time (A), February 23, 2014. Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; Responsorial Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 8, 10, 12-13; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23; Matthew 5:38-48.

[3] Joseph Louis Bernardin (originally Bernardini) (April 2, 1928 – November 14, 1996) was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983. In the same year, Cardinal Bernardin developed the "Consistent Ethic of Life" (or CLE) ideology, which expressed his response to living in an age in which he believed modern technologies threatened the sanctity of human life. Bernardin's CLE philosophy is sometimes called the "seamless garment", a reference from John 19:23 to the seamless robe of Jesus. The seamless garment philosophy holds that issues such as abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice and economic injustice all demand a consistent application of moral principles that value the sacredness of human life. In response to critiques from some pro-life activists, Bernardin clarified that the ethic never meant that all threats to life were equal, from a societal or political standpoint. One of his final works was writing a book about his own dying, an excerpt of which served as a Newsweek Magazine cover story, and which admirers saw as a lesson in dying.

Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord (2014)

The great British educator, Sir Ken Robinson, tells the story of three little boys, five and six year olds, who played the role of the three King’s at their Kindergarten Nativity Play[1]. They came marching in before the manger with paper hats and each carrying on box. The first boy laid his box before the baby Jesus and announced, “I have brought you gold.”  The second laid his box down and announced, “I have brought you myrrh.” Now the third boy came down with sudden stage fright, but he plowed through it, remembered he had to put his box down but forgot his line.  So he announced, “Frank sent this.”[2]

There are very many Epiphany stories revolving around the three Kings and their mission to seek, worship and give gifts to the King of Kings. I enjoy telling Henry Van Dyke’s story about the Fourth Wise Man, O Henry’s, The Gift of the Magi[3], and G. K. Chesterton’s story about the Modern Wise Men

These and many other Epiphany stories are wonderful, but they concern mostly the gift aspect of the gospel. There is message that is fundamental to the Epiphany that we might not reflect on as thoroughly as we should. We hear this message in today’s second reading. The message is a message of mystery.  St. Paul speaks about a great mystery that has been revealed. The mystery is simply this: the Gentiles are coheirs with the Jews, members of the same body, and copartners of the promise of Christ in the gospel[4]. The wise men came from the East.  They were pagan astrologers called to the manger, called to faith. Their journey is our journey, the journey of people throughout the world and throughout history being called to the manger, being called to faith. The Epiphany is the celebration of our being included in the Mystery of Jesus Christ; not just included, more than included. It is the celebration of our being equal to the very people chosen to be the physical ancestors of the human nature of our Lord.

This was certainly difficult for the Jewish people of the first century to understand. They normally referred to those who were not Jews, the Gentiles, as dogs. It was mind boggling for them to think that God would consider the Gentiles their equals. The Jews were the chosen people. Would God include others in His Plan for their salvation? Yes! The Epiphany tells us, this was always God’s plan. He never intended to be the God for only one portion of mankind. Even more, all people would be co-heirs of the Grace of Christ.

It was difficult for Jewish Christians to buy into the message of the Epiphany. It is also difficult for many of us. We tend to see life through our own limited frames of reference. 

When we envision the birth of the Lord, we tend to see him in the viewpoint of our own frame of reference. Therefore, most of the pictures of Mary and Jesus are of a fair skinned girl and a bouncing, blue eyed baby. But Jesus and Mary were not Europeans, not even Italian, as hard as that is to believe. Mary and Jesus were Semitic, people of that area of the world where the three races merge. I often think that God placed the Chosen people there as a message that all the people he created was to be the Chosen people.

Sadly, this is a message that is still secret. There is a certain arrogance that many Catholics have that is evident when they look down on people who are not from their culture. The Epiphany tells us that African Catholics are as Catholic as Asian Catholics and all Catholics.  It also tells our brothers and sisters across the ocean that American Catholics are as Catholic as European Catholics.

We Catholics do not have the right to assume a spiritual superiority over any members of our faith whose background may be different than ours, or whose history in the Church might be shorter than ours. I am very pleased with the way that the members of the parish receive those who come into the faith on Easter trough the RCIA program. You understand that once a person has professed the faith, that person is an equal in the faith.  We need to apply this same way of thinking to those from different continents. We have to recognize that whether the faith is relatively new to an area, or has been there for over fifteen hundred years, we are all one body, equal before the Lord.

The word Epiphany means a showing or manifestation of the Lord.  He was first shown to the wise men, astrologers whose faith guided them to Bethlehem.  We need to show Him to all people seeking the spiritual body where they can be one with God ■

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[1] Sir Kenneth Robinson (born 4 March 1950) is an English author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education, and arts bodies. He was Director of The Arts in Schools Project (1985–89), Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (1989–2001), and was knighted in 2003 for services to education. Originally from a working-class Liverpool family, Robinson now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Marie-Therese and children James and Kate.

[2] Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, January 5, 2014. Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Responsorial Psalm: 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12.

[3] The Gift of the Magi is a short story, written by O. Henry (a pen name for William Sydney Porter), about a young married couple and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money. As a sentimental story with a moral lesson about gift-giving, it has been a popular one for adaptation, especially for presentation at Christmas time. The plot and its "twist ending" are well-known, and the ending is generally considered an example of cosmic irony. It was allegedly written at Pete's Tavern on Irving Place in New York City. The story was initially published in The New York Sunday World under the title Gifts of the Magi on December 10, 1905. It was first published in book form in the O. Henry Anthology The Four Million in April 1906.

[4] Ephesians 3:6.