Homily for the 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, February 19, 2023. Gospel of St. Matthew 5:38-48. Theme: The Radical Love of Christianity
In the Gospel we just read, Jesus is teaching us that the only way to end the vicious cycle of hatred in our lives is for someone to pull the plug on it. We Christians call pulling this plug “forgiveness” and it's something we must be willing to do - or to at least be working towards - if we want to truly call ourselves Christian. This call to forgiveness is really a continuation of what Jesus has been saying to us over the past few Sundays in His Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the merciful; you must be salt and light for the world; and goodness begins within the heart. And today He also goes to the very core of the human person, deep into our gut where the reaction we have to our enemies is to get even.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who died as a martyr in a Nazi concentration camp, had a personal motto on this very teaching of Christ. He would often say, “Hatred destroys, love alone gives life. So love without limit!” And Kolbe walked the walk and lived those words to the day he died in Auschwitz, assisting fellow inmates as best he could in their suffering and urging them to forgive the Nazis, not to hate them. He kept reminding them that hatred would only change them for the worse on the inside and make them similar to their enemies. It takes a spiritually strong person to pull that plug of forgiveness, but Jesus promises us the grace to accomplish it. Kolbe got this strength from his personal love for Jesus Christ, from his reception and adoration of the Eucharist and from the true devotion he had for the Blessed Mother. The Gospel was his daily guide to love and forgiveness.
Forgiveness requires good intention, moral courage, emotional maturity and spiritual muscle. Striking back verbally or physically and hurting someone is actually so very childish…it happens on every school yard throughout the world. And yet there are plenty of adults who remain emotionally childish and hold on to every single hurt that has ever been committed against them! Those of us who know such people can attest that they gradually become very bitter, more resentful and increasingly unpleasant to be around. Like hatred, they become toxic to us. And toxic is exactly what hatred is for us, corroding the heart and eventually killing our emotional and spiritual lives. Forgiveness - made possible by the grace of Christ - is the antidote to this poison and the remedy that will eventually heal the wound.
Dr. Robert Enright, is an internationally acclaimed Catholic psychologist known as the “Trailblazer of Forgiveness”. He travels the world as part of the International Forgiveness Institute and has dedicated the past 30 years of his life to helping people achieve the freedom from hatred, rejecting revenge and retaliation. Here is how he describes forgiveness, a definition that actually could have been written by Jesus himself:
When you forgive someone who has deeply hurt you, it means that you let go of resentment and the urge to seek revenge, no matter how deserving of these things the wrongdoer may be. You choose instead to give the great gifts of acceptance, generosity and love. Forgiving is an act of mercy toward an offender, someone who others say does not deserve our mercy, but you don’t let that stand in your way. Rather, you forgive because you have freely and intentionally chosen to have a merciful heart.
Dr. Enright is careful to point out that forgiveness does not always mean reconciliation with the person who has offended us. That may never come about but it doesn’t have to happen in order for forgiveness to be genuine. Most of the time we will really struggle to forgive as we wrestle with the negativity that arises each time the memory of a hurt resurfaces. But we need to remember that Jesus did not say that we had to like the offender or ignore as insignificant what was done to us. He simply said that we had to let go of the hurt and strive to forgive the one who caused it.
Notice also that Jesus doesn’t say that our forgiveness must happen immediately although it certainly must be our ultimate goal. The best we might be able to do in the beginning is to show our good intention by asking God for at least the desire to want to forgive. This is a good start and eventually, if we are sincere with that prayer, we will reach a place of actual forgiveness. Then once we are able to finally let go of the hurt we can begin to experience the inner peace and serenity that flows from forgiveness. We will be on our way to understanding what it means to be free from the inside out.
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