February 12, 2023
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 12, 2023 – Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:20-22A, 27-28, 33-34A, 37
Recently I have taken to watching a British murder mystery series called the Dr. Blake Mysteries. It takes place in Australia and, as you probably know, many people in Australia are Catholic. Because the first white settlers in Australia were prisoners sent there from Ireland in a large deportation. When their prison sentences were up, many of them stayed, and they raised families there, and began a new life there. This Dr. Blake is a fallen-away Catholic, hasn’t been to Church in many years. But some of his friends and close associates do still go to Mass.
So, in this particular episode, a number of them are suffering. One has been the victim of a crime, another one is a victim of unfairness within the police department, and another one is carrying a great burden, a great sadness. And, near the end of the episode, Dr. Blake goes into a Catholic church for the first time in many, many years. And, like most Catholics, he sits in the back. And he says to God, out loud, “Don’t you care? Don’t you care about … ,” and he lists each person, in order. Don’t you care about this one? Don’t you care about that one? And, after he finishes, he gets up out of his seat, he walks up the center aisle, and the camera is behind the cross on the high altar, so we can see through the cross at him walking up the aisle. And we think to ourselves, “Oh, he is going to tell God he loves Him. This is the big conversion scene.” He walks right up to the altar, he stares up at the cross, he shakes his head, he turns around, and he stomps out of the Church.
I had one of those moments this past week watching the devastation shown on television about the earthquake and all of the stories about violence here in New York State and other places. And you say to yourself sometimes, like Dr. Blake, “Where is God? Where is God in all of this? How could He let this happen? How could over twenty thousand people be killed in an earthquake?” Is it actually God’s fault?
Back in the first decade of the twentieth century, we had a terrible earthquake in San Francisco. One of the worst quakes on record. When it was over, when civilization was back to normal in that area, architects and builders began to examine how buildings are constructed and why they crumble so quickly in earthquakes. And they began to develop building techniques that were resistant to earthquakes. Human ingenuity.
About a year ago, a senior citizens complex in Florida collapsed. Right down. People’s homes were lost. And, in the aftermath of that tragedy, it was discovered that building codes were ignored, and people built, deliberately - to make money - deliberately on shaky ground. And sometimes, even natural disasters are worse than they could be either because of laziness, or because of ignorance, or because of corruption. When you factor out all the other excuses though, there’s a little tiny bit left over that you can’t explain. That little, tiny bit is what we call, in the Catholic church, the effects of original sin. Sometimes things just go wrong because they go wrong. And they go wrong because, from the very beginning, we tampered with God’s good earth.
That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to the first reading. Because this is what it says in the first sentence. “If you choose, you can keep the Commandments.” Really? Even though that’s Revelation, it’s wrong. The rest of the Old Testament counters that statement by talking about how much we need God’s help in order to do right. But it’s not true that if you can, if you can, if you want to, you can keep the Commandments.
All that we know of free will is just the tip of an iceberg. Everything else is percolating below the surface. They call it the preconscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious and all sorts of pressures blocking our way.
The parents here in Church, and grandparents were taught in the Catechism that there were three things necessary to commit a grave sin. First of all, the thing you do has to be wrong. Secondly, you have to know it’s wrong when you do it. Thirdly, and this is the escape clause, you have to have free will. There are lots of things that interfere with free will. So, even though the thing that’s done may be a terrible thing, the person who does it may very well not be responsible before God for what they do.
So, we see that in the first reading. And it’s too cut and dry because it’s based on something that’s one of the most ancient heresies. It’s called the Pelagian heresy - that we’re okay. All we need is a little information, a little help from God, we can get it right. And so, Jesus didn’t come to offer His life for our sins, He came to give us guidance. That’s the heresy. It lives in today’s world, in things called American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, the brave new world. The thing that Ann Rand wrote about - that we can do it all by ourselves. But we can’t.
That’s why you have to listen carefully to what Jesus says in today’s gospel. We read the short form because it leaves out a lot of Jesus’ sidebars. We’re going to deal with one of the sidebars in just a second. But first, listen. The first thing He talks about is murder. He says, “Killing people is bad, so is being angry with them.” Now, this is the sidebar. He says, “Whoever says to his brother raca, is answerable to the Sanhedrin. Whoever says you’re a fool is liable to the fires of hell.” Really?
No one knows what the word raca meant to Jesus. It’s a dialect of Aramaic. No one can translate it. And I looked at various Bible translations to see what they say. But probably, in modern English, the best thing I can come up with that Jesus is saying is, “You are liable to condemnation if you say to your brother loser. Loser. I think what Jesus actually said was something that we can’t say in polite society. But loser fits the bill. We say things like that to people all the time in our social media. We say it about people. We say it to people. And Jesus says, “If you treat other people that way, and say those kinds of things to people, it is the wrong thing to do.
Then He says, “Not only if you commit adultery, but if you look adulterously at a woman, you’re liable to judgement. That speaks to the #me too problem. That, in this enlightened society, after the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, after the feminist movement, women are still being objectified. There is a commercial on TV for Dupixent. It’s a psoriasis medicine. In the commercial, they feature little girls between the ages of ten and twelve. And one group of little girls are in dance class. They’re dressed so provocatively, for twelve-year-olds, and their faces are made up with mascara. They look like little tramps. Why are we advertising a skin preparation by sexualizing little girls? It’s insane. It has nothing to do even with the medication. It has to do with people’s perception of what a woman should be.
Jesus says, “Don’t swear. Don’t take an oath. Just say yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no.” That speaks to the prevailing dishonesty in our society. We aim at plausible deniability. Plausible deniability. Not the truth.
All of these things Jesus spoke about seem to be like the first reading saying, “If you want to, you can do the right thing. “ Remember, I have said a couple of times in my homilies that the key to the Sunday readings is the middle reading? It tells us what the Church wants us to think about the first reading and the Gospel. In the second reading, St. Paul says, “I don’t teach human wisdom. I teach a wisdom based on the crucifixion of Jesus.” Jesus, who said all these things and did all these things. And what did He get for them? He got beaten up and then murdered. That’s what He got for saying the things we just heard Him say. What’s the point that the Church is making? That sometimes the only way that God can journey with us, is to journey like us.
About fifteen or twenty years ago, Joan Osborne said it best in a line from one of her songs. She said, “Suppose, suppose that God was one of us. Just a slob like one of us.”