A few years ago I attended a presentation over at Town Hall given by a
Muslim medical doctor from the Gaza Strip whose three daughters and a
niece were tragically and senselessly killed one night in their family
home by Israeli shells that should never have been fired. The tragedy
could have embittered the man for life; instead, it led him to write an
incredibly moving book that earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace
Prize. The book is entitled ”I Shall Not Hate.” Instead of calling for
revenge or retaliation, the doctor calls for dialogue between
Palestinians and Israelis, expressing the hope that his daughters will
be (in his words) “the last sacrifice on the road to peace between
Palestinians and Israelis.” A remarkable story, a timely one, and a more
powerful homily on today’s gospel than I could ever give.
“You have heard the commandment, ‘An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, offer no resistance
to evil. When a person strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer
him the other…You have heard the commandment, ‘You shall love your
neighbor but hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, love your enemies, pray
for your persecutors….”
Is it telling or not that the best homily I
ever heard on those words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount was the
lecture given by that Muslim doctor! But the words of Jesus
words
aren’t just words: they are commandments. In the Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus is the new Moses, the new Lawgiver, and he lays down commandments
so lofty and idealistic that we might wonder if Jesus was maybe
out-of-touch with life’s harsher realities. But, of course, he wasn’t.
No more than that Muslim doctor was. Jesus knew the dark side of human
nature only too well, and in the end he would himself become a lightning
rod for human cruelty at its worst. Even so, he refused to strike back.
When nailed to the cross he spoke only words of forgiveness: “Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
There’s a part of us that stands in utter
amazement at this, but another part says, ‘Jesus was divine. I’m only
human.’ But we don’t get off that easily. Divinity for Jesus was not a
shortcut around humanity. That would turn the Incarnation into
play-acting. No, Jesus, who was “tempted like us in all things,” must
himself have struggled to get beyond the urge to strike back. And you
and I? Rather than struggle with it, too often we look for ways to
justify it because if we took Jesus at his word – did what he did -
wouldn’t we become doormats, and wouldn’t human society dissolve into
anarchy?
These are legitimate questions and far from
theoretical. At the personal level we deal with them all the time in our
relationships with family members, co-workers, friends. Too often, we
look for ways to get even for slights, hurts, and misunderstandings. Too
often, we pay back in kind and, in so doing, we only make matters worse.
That’s at the personal level.
At the societal level – between peoples
and nations - we do the same. Many of the wars down through history come
to mind, and so do actions that bring us perilously close to war like
the recent attacks and counter-attacks in Iraq and Iran, the
repercussions of which we may not yet have seen. And then there is the
issue of the death penalty which is before our State legislature again
this session. Our governor has made it clear that no executions will
take place on his watch – good for him - but getting the prohibition of
the death penalty enshrined in law has proven difficult, to say the
least. And even if it passes, it’s one thing to change a law and another
thing to change minds. And, on this issue, sad to say, Catholics are
just as likely as the general population to favor the death penalty even
though the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the teachings of recent
Popes – including Pope Francis who has called the death penalty
unacceptable in all cases – all make it crystal clear that
State-sponsored executions are incompatible with the teaching of Jesus.
And there is more here than the teaching of
Jesus: there is also Jesus’ own personal embrace of non-violence that I
referred to earlier, Jesus who, when he became the target of human
cruelty, refused to retaliate, Jesus who accepted death, opening his
arms on the cross – as if to say, only in this way will we ever break
the endless cycle of retaliation and revenge.
All this can seem naïve, but Jesus says
that it is God’s way and that means it must be our way, too. “You must
be perfect”, we heard him say in today’s gospel, “you must be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect.”
My friends, Jesus calls us to do nothing less
than what God does in the face of evil: confront it, not with more evil,
but with love: God who makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust
alike, who shows mercy and compassion to all. This is not to say that
society cannot protect itself from aggressive and violent offenders. It
must, of course. But to take a life in order to exact revenge for
another life is to play God and to sin against the inherent value of
each and every human life.
In a powerful sermon he once preached on
non-violence, Dr. Martin Luther King once said that, “The ultimate
weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the
very thing it seeks to destroy. Returning violence for violence
multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of
stars.”
My friends, we live in a night
all too devoid of stars, but it doesn’t have to be this way. When He
embraced the cross and willingly accepted death, Jesus showed us the
path to peace and reconciliation, and every time we offer this Sacrifice
in his memory and receive into our own bodies His Body that was broken
for us, Jesus not only shows us the path to peace and reconciliation, he
takes us there. But only if we’re willing to go.
Father Michael G. Ryan
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