BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (# 13)
7th Sunday In Ordinary Time, Year C – February 22, 2004
“Radically God-Like”
BIBLE READINGS
I Sm 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23 // I Cor 15:45-49 // Lk 6:27-38
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
I read this story in GUIDEPOSTS magazine many years ago, and I simply cannot forget the message of forgiveness and mercy that it communicates. It is about a mother who was filled with rage and vindictiveness against the drunk driver who killed her son in a senseless car accident. No doubt she wanted him dead. Hatred began to eat her up. She pleaded: “Oh, dear Lord, help me. I don’t want to hate like this. Please help me get rid of it.” The words of the Gospel about forgiveness and mercy began to weigh on her conscience almost daily after that. In her heart she knew that God was asking her to forgive the young man who killed her son. Circumstances brought her to see him, not as a murderer, but as a person in need of love and guidance. She forgave him and helped him rebuild his life. Her torment faded away and the lady testified: “How good it was to laugh again! To forgive and love and go on living.”
This Sunday’s Gospel reading (Lk 6:27-38), which is part of Christ’s Sermon on the Plain, is composed of two sections: “love of enemies” (v. 27-35) and “compassion and generosity” (v. 36-38). This Gospel passage carries the tremendous Christian challenge that we must be radically God-like in extending forgiveness, love and mercy to all. Jesus’ exigent demands resound: “Love your enemies … Do good to them … Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” The biblical scholar Samuel Oyin Abigunrin comments: “As the Son of God, Jesus revealed to humankind a vision of God long known to Israel but in no other religious tradition among the nations of the world: a God-image involving the centrality of forgiveness … Just as God is merciful, so those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ ought to act mercifully toward those around us. This is the heart of the Christian life: giving of ourselves to the betterment of others.”
The words of Jesus on forgiveness and compassion, however, should not be falsely interpreted and taken out of their messianic context. His words on non-retaliation and forgiveness do not call us to passivity nor allow us to succumb to evil and injustice. The authors of the Days of the Lord, vol. 6 contend: “It would not be fair to make a mockery of Jesus’ very serious words, to dismiss them after presenting them as a defense of a kind of pacifism that would endanger the peace, justice, and freedom of individuals and groups, indeed even of whole nations. They do not absolutely authorize inaction, passivity, still less an attitude of personal or collective resignation in the face of injustice, violence, and extortion. The whole Gospel testifies to the way in which the tradition has understood this. We cannot forget that in the synagogue at Nazareth Jesus proclaimed that he was sent to bring freedom to prisoners and the oppressed … he consoled the afflicted; he went about doing good.”
Indeed, rather than an authorization to negative passivity, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke should be interpreted as a challenge to radicality. Aelred Rosser asserts: “It’s about being radical: radically loving, radically generous, radically God-like. All the kinds of behavior that Luke records here are summed up in one kind of behavior: God-like behavior. To what extent can we behave like God? To a far greater extent than most of us do. The bottom line may be put this way: if there is no difference between how Christians behave and how non-Christians behave, where’s the evidence that Christianity is different?”
The forgiving and compassionate Father of Jesus is also a just God. St. Augustine reminds us: “Never let us add sin to sin, because whoever presumes too much on God’s mercy has secretly consented to the suggestion that he can cause God to be unjust. Such a person imagines that even if he persists in sin and refuses to give up his wrongdoing, God will still come and give him a place among his obedient servants. Would this be justice, for God to assign an obstinate sinner like you the same place as those who have turned their backs on sin? Would you be so unjust as to expect God to be unjust too?”
The radical call to forgiveness, love and mercy points to the extraordinary character of Jesus who addresses this challenge to us anew, in the here and now. He who invites us to this radical expression of God’s benevolence and compassion will also give us the grace and inner strength to be radically loving and forgiving. According to St. Augustine: “It is a different matter in the case of someone who loves God and Christ.” In such a loving disciple, everything is possible. Trusting in the grace of God, the Christian disciple who is called to be radically loving, radically generous and radically God-like is able to say: “In him who is the source of my strength, I have strength for everything” (Phil 4:13).
How does this Sunday’s Gospel on forgiveness and mercy provoke me?
What is my response to the command of Jesus: “Love your enemies and do good to them … Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:35-36)?
Do I use Christ’s teaching on forgiveness and compassion as an excuse to hide the absence of justice and to acquiesce to the onslaught of injustice and evil?
(Cf. Responsorial Psalm of the Sunday Liturgy – Psalm 103)
(R.) THE LORD IS KIND AND MERCIFUL.
Bless the Lord, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits. (R.)
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills.
He redeems your life from destruction,
crowns you with kindness and compassion. (R.)
Merciful and gracious is the Lord,
slow to anger and abounding in kindness.
Not according to our sins does he deal with us,
nor does he requite us according to our crimes. (R.)
As far the east is from the west,
so far has he put our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. (R.)
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“Love your enemies and do good to them … Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (Lk 6:35-36)
ACTION PLAN: Name someone who has hurt you. Pray for that person for a period of time and offer him/her your gift of forgiveness even from afar.
ACTION PLAN: Pray for all priests and ministers of reconciliation in the Christian community.
Prepared by: Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang, PDDM