7th Sunday in Ordinary Time (23.02.14)
Would You Read That Again, Please!
Short of time, people word-skim rather than read. Promising ourselves a more intelligent read later we may skim-read a document. Something similar can happen at Mass. Listening to the reading of the Word of God, we can also be juggling plans for the remainder of the day. Yet our senses are capable of picking up an arresting phrase or sentence, thanks to the Holy Spirit. Those three small crosses with which we sign our self – on our forehead, lips and heart – as the Gospel is announced is itself a prayer for Divine support: ‘May the Lord be in my thoughts, on my lips and in my heart this day’.
It was the very first line of the Matthew Gospel for this 7th Sunday of the Year (5:38) that arrested my wandering thoughts! I almost felt like asking, ‘Would you, please, read that line again?”
‘Jesus said to his disciples:
“You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.”
Despite regular attendance at Mass, Jesus’ words impacted in a way I had not previously experienced:
“But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.”
What on earth are we to make of it? Defense and retaliation occupy a lion’s share of national consciousness not to mention a substantial portion of national budgets. Matthew presents Jesus underlining to his disciples their path to holiness through non-violence. Clearly, if we are to accept and be committed to Jesus’ teaching about nonviolence, about offering forgiveness and loving our enemies, there can be neither we weakness or cowardice.
It takes great bravery to forgive. Jesus called for such bravery in those he had chosen as co-workers. He challenged them to go way beyond the Hebrew law of retaliation of “an eye for an eye”. This itself was a substantial restraint on the previous ‘anything goes’ in the matter of retaliation. Jesus steps it up to: “offer no resistance to one who is evil.” In case there remained confusion about what he meant, Matthew’s Jesus offered examples that continue to challenge human logic and sense of fairness. “Turn your other cheek” (Matt 5:39), ‘Go a second mile’ (Matt 5:41), ‘Hand over your coat as well as your shirt’ (Matt 5:40) and ‘Give to anyone who asks of you.”(Matt 5:42)
Then Jesus went even further with the challenge to holiness: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.” For Jesus and his companions, the enemy would have been the Roman Army of Occupation as well as hostile Jews, Samaritans and gentiles.
Forgiving, loving and praying for enemies and persecutors was then, and remains now, socially unappetizing in our selfish modern economy. As Pope Francis emphasizes, we cannot diminish the challenges Jesus sets before us by searching madly for loopholes or rationalizations that dilute their gravity. Believers in Jesus are called beyond the law and beyond even the most generous ethical humanism (“even the pagans do as much”) to a perfection that reflects the holiness of God. This is a holiness that precludes revenge and retaliation while invoking a love that can only come from the One who is Love. We, for our part, are to welcome this love. We are to resolve, by the strength of His love living in us, to take Jesus at his word.
Jesus isn’t inviting us to give in to evil. He is saying that those through whom evil is delivered to us are themselves victims of evil and, therefore, in need of being redeemed. Redemption is never achieved by returning violence for violence, in whatever form. In his Humanity, Jesus did not offer resistance to the Evil One who manipulated events that led to Jesus being crucified and dying. In his Divinity, Jesus subsumed the Evil One’s domination of corrupted humanity. Jesus then brought humanity Resurrection through Him own Death and Resurrection.
The late Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary, was arrested and interrogated by the Communist regime in his country in 1948. He managed to get a last message to his people before being taken away:
“I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. . . . Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance. I do not accuse my accusers. …I pray for those who, in the words of Our Lord, ‘know not what they do.’ I forgive them from the bottom of my heart.”
Physical beatings and sleep deprivation failed to break him. It is said that his interrogators realised that they could not ‘break him’ when, each time he was brought to them, he repeated that he forgave them. They couldn’t break a man who loved them despite what they were doing to him.
Also in 1948 before he died, Mahatma Gandhi wrote these prophetic words: “Have I the nonviolence of the brave in me? My death alone will show that. If someone killed me and I died with prayer for the assassin on my lips and God’s remembrance and consciousness of His living presence in the sanctuary of my heart, only then would I be said to have the nonviolence of the brave” (Gandhi the Man, Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, Tomales, Calif.: 1966).
Not long after, a Hindu who resented Gandhi’s respect for Muslims approached him as he was making his way to evening prayer and shot him three times in the chest. Before he died, Gandhi raised his hand in a gesture of forgiveness and murmured, “Rama, rama, rama” (“I forgive you, I love you, I bless you”).
As I wrote earlier, the impact of Jesus’ teaching required more than one reread of Matthew Gospel (5:38-48) with the corollary challenge as to why, at that point, Jesus’ words were especially challenging. When we are truly open to receive God’s Word, Jesus our Saviour, He can be a God of surprises!