Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 20, 2022 – 1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38

Sometimes we are at a disadvantage when we hear the Sunday morning scriptures because they’re almost always taken out of context. St. Luke meant for last Sunday’s gospel and this Sunday’s gospel and next Sunday’s gospel to be read or heard all at the same time.

Remember what happened last Sunday. We had the beginning of a bunch of sayings of Jesus which were handed down in the earliest years of Christianity, and both Matthew and Luke took a shot at putting them in a context. Matthew’s context is very interesting. He has Jesus speak His beatitudes - …blessed are those… - at the very beginning of Jesus public life, and pronounce His woes against the Pharisees and scribes as part of His very last public speech. Luke, on the other hand, puts them all together. And, whereas Matthew had Jesus go up on a mountain, St. Luke is explicit in saying Jesus came down from the mountain, stood on a level stretch - in other word, eye to eye – with his audience.

And both of them say that, in this speech, Jesus was addressing His disciples, those who were learning from Him, to follow Him, and to those standing around them. So, you can imagine in the crowd, people who are hostile to Jesus, who’ve come to heckle or to find fault, people who are still trying to make up their minds, people who are just curious about Jesus. And St. Luke means for us to understand that they are overhearing what the disciples are hearing. Because we, too, are overhearing this conversation. And we, too, have got to make up our minds about what Jesus is saying, so that we can go from just being hearers to being disciples.

And last week, when Jesus pronounced His woes, and even when He pronounced His blesseds, he was so aggressive, that St. Luke presents a very unattractive image of Jesus. Today, Jesus backs off. We kind of imagine Him with a twinkle in His eye, saying the things we just heard Him say. Because, look at what He actually does. In last Sunday’s gospel, Jesus did the very thing He says we shouldn’t do today. He condemned. “Woe to you. Woe to you.” He was judgmental. Now, in this morning’s gospel He says, “Don’t do that. Don’t be like I just was, but rather be merciful as your Father is merciful. Stop judging, and you won’t be judged.”

In our public society, these days, there are three areas that need to hear this message of Jesus. The first is our system of jurisprudence. Sentencing for a crime is meant, according to law, to do two things - to punish the offender for breaking the law, and to make it possible for the offender to come to a better realization of how to live in society. But very often we see on TV terrible moments, when people who have suffered the ultimate loss, the loss of a loved one by violence, stand up in court and plea for the harshest sentence possible. We want to see our system of jurisprudence exact vengeance. That’s not the purpose of law. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” Not yours. But, because that’s the way we react, we expect more of our system of jurisprudence than it has the right to deliver. And, in the end, hardly anyone is ever satisfied in the long run by what they got.

Another area of great concern, over the last ten years the number of highway deaths has doubled. And the majority of those highway deaths are caused by one or another kind of road rage. People treat their car like a tool of aggression, to get themselves somehow ahead of or over on another human being. Because we’re all so very angry about so many things, that that’s a good place for us to let our anger flow.

The third area is our social media. Our social media is one of the greatest inventions of modern science, when you think about it. Back in the late 1800s they had to lay cable across an ocean just so we could use Morse code to communicate with each other. And now, all you have to do is press a button, and you can talk or text to anyone in the world. People we will never meet, but we can talk to them. That’s astounding! It was the dream of people for centuries that we could talk to other people everywhere in the world. Now look what we’ve done to it. It’s become the place where people vent the most malicious speech, the most judgmental speech against one another.

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged.”

When I was in college seminary, we had a professor of Latin who was a priest - and I don’t think he wanted to be a teacher, frankly – but he was an alumnus of mine from my high school. But, rather than bond with me, at least once a marking period he would find some way in class to humiliate me in front of my classmates. Either because of a mistake I’d made on a test paper, or a wrong answer given verbally in class. I’d built up an enormous resentment against this man. At my graduation from college I didn’t go over to shake his hand.

Well, guess what? When I was a young priest, I was assigned to a parish where his brother and sister-in-law lived. And they were very lovely people and went out of their way to befriend me, and invite me to dinner now and then. One day they invited me to a summer barbeque. And I get there, and who’s there but my priest nemesis. And we were civil to each other, but I made it a point to spend most of my day eating and talking with other groups of people.

Then I was reassigned and I forgot all about it. And years later, years later – carry this grudge all this time against this person – I ran into the brother and sister-in-law. By this time, my nemesis was dead. And somehow we began chatting and, out of the blue the bother says to me, “My brother always spoke so well of you.” And here I’d been carry this grudge for the better part of twenty years against someone who maybe was playing with me in the classroom and I was too stupid to recognize that he wanted me to give back what he was giving to me. Or to do something else instead of just caving under it. But it made me so angry that I did this terrible thing for such a long time.

“Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.”

Is God merciful? You know, most things that go wrong in the world, whether natural calamities or manmade calamities, they can be traced, ultimately, to some mistake or crime that somebody has committed. In other words, last week we had tornadoes in Alabama, in the middle of February there was a mudslide in Brazil. These things probably have something to do with a century of ignoring climate issues or contributing to climate failure. But there are things that we cannot explain. Is it God’s fault that they happen?

What I have discovered, in my own life - and I can’t testify to you because what happens to me doesn’t affect you – I can testify to you that, in my own life, I have found God to be very merciful to me. And, I think, if you look at your own life in a different light… One of the scripture commentaries that I used before, to prepare for this homily, had a very interesting saying. It said, “In America, modern society, we believe that we should get what we deserve. And that we have to deserve what we get. I mean, isn’t that the story of Santa Claus? You know, you get coal in your stocking if you’ve been bad. God doesn’t treat us that way. We don’t get what we deserve, and have to work to deserve what we get.

“Be merciful, the way your Father has been merciful to you.”