Sunday Homily: U.S. Christians Shouldn’t Be the World’s Most Violent People (But We Are!)

Readings for 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time: LV 19: 1-2, 17-18; PS 103: 1-4, 8, 10, 12-13; I COR 3: 16-23; MT 5: 38-48.

We’re living at a time characterized by military crisis; wouldn’t you agree? I mean we’re still in Afghanistan (our country’s longest war ever). Can you tell me why? We’re also fighting in Iraq and have been doing that one way or another since at least 1990. Then there’s Syria and Yemen – not to mention droning in Libya, Somalia, and who knows where else? And on top of that there’s saber-rattling about what Russia does in its backyard, and even about “our” rights to float battleships in the South China Sea – more than 7000 miles away from our shores. We spend more on war than all the other nations of the world combined, and are in the process of modernizing our nuclear weapons arsenal that our “leaders” once pledged to abolish.

And what has it all accomplished? Can you tell me that? Well, while it may make arms manufacturers richer and happier, here’s a short list of its downsides:

• It kills millions of people – yes more than a million in Iraq alone since 2003!
• It threatens the very future of the human race.
• It contributes mightily to environmental destruction,
• And to global warming as the U.S. military remains the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world
• As well as to the creation of an unprecedented refugee problem,
• It appears to motivate terrorists to respond in kind.
• All of which seems to make us less safe rather than more so.

Doesn’t that seem crazy? Why do we put up with it? I mean to spend more than a billion dollars each day on war and to have absolutely nothing positive to show for it? NOTHING! And then instead of facing that colossal failure, to pledge to do even more of the same – forever and ever?

I’m hard put to think of anything crazier. And scandalously, it’s a nation that claims to be Christian that’s doing all of that – in the name of God and even of Jesus. The Muslims would have a hard time even remotely approaching that level of religiously-motivated violence!

Say, here’s an idea: why don’t we try following the actual teachings of Jesus as found in today’s Liturgy of the Word? I didn’t say “the teachings of the Bible” in general, but the teachings of Jesus.

I mean, in today’s Gospel, the Master takes pains to distinguish between the Bible’s warlike vengeful God and its Compassionate One. Jesus specifically rejects the one and endorses the other. For Matthew that rejection and endorsement was momentous – as significant as Moses reception of the Ten Commandments from his God, Yahweh. That’s why Matthew [in contrast to Luke’s equivalent “Sermon on the Plain” (LK 6:17-49)] has Jesus deliver his “sermon” on a mountain (5:1-7:27). The evangelist is implicitly comparing Moses on Mt. Sinai and Jesus on “the Mount.”

In any case, through a series of antitheses (“You have heard . .. but I say to you . . .”), Jesus contrasts his understanding of the Law with more traditional interpretations. The Mosaic Law demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but Jesus’ Law commands:

• Turning the other cheek
  • Going the extra mile
  • Generosity with adversaries
  • Open-handedness to beggars
  • Lending without charging interest
  • Love of enemies

Matthew concludes that if we want to be followers of Jesus, we must also be merciful and compassionate ourselves. As today’s reading from Leviticus says, we are called to be holy as God is holy. Or as Jesus puts it, perfect as God is perfect.

And how perfect is that? It’s the perfection of nature where the sun shines on good and bad alike – where rain falls on all fields regardless of who owns them. It’s the perfection of the God described in this morning’s responsorial. According to the psalmist, the Divine One pardons all placing an infinite distance (“as far as east is from west”) between sinners and their guilt. God heals all ills and as a loving parent is the very source of human goodness and compassion. That’s the perfection that Jesus’ followers are called to emulate.

All of that is contrasted with what Paul calls “the wisdom of the world” in today’s excerpt from his first letter to the Christian community in Corinth. The world regards turning the other cheek as weakness. Going the extra mile only invites exploitation. Generosity towards legal adversaries will lose you your case in court. Open-handedness towards beggars encourages laziness. Lending without interest is simply bad business. And loving one’s enemies is a recipe for military defeat and enslavement.

Yet Paul insists. And he bases his insistence on the conviction that we encounter God in every human individual whether they be our abusers, exploiters, or legal adversaries – whether they be beggars or debtors unlikely to repay our interest-free loans.

All of those people, Paul points out are “temples of God.” God dwells in each of them just as God does in us. In the end, that’s the basis of the command we heard in the Leviticus reading, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Normally, our self-centered culture interprets that dictum to mean: (1) we clearly love ourselves more above all; so (2) we should love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves.

But in the light of Paul’s mystical teaching that God dwells within every human being, the command about neighbor-love takes on much deeper implication. That is, Paul the mystic teaches that our deepest Self is the very God who dwells within each of us as in the Temple. We should therefore love our neighbor (and our enemy, debtor, adversary, and those who beg and borrow from us) because God dwells within them — because they ARE ourselves. They ARE us! To bomb them, to fight wars against them is therefore suicidal.

No wonder, then, that Paul predicts the destruction of the person who fails to recognize others as temples of God and harms them. Paul means that by destroying others we ipso facto destroy ourselves, because in the end, the God-Self dwelling within us is identical with the Self present in the ones we shoot, bomb and drone. That is a very high mystical teaching. It should be the faith of those pretending to follow Jesus. It should make all of them (all of us!) pacifists.

If we owned that truth, that would be the end of wars. Imagine if the world’s 2.2 billion Christians gave up our addiction to violence and simply refused to destroy our fellow human beings because we recognized in them the indwelling presence of God. Imagine if we stopped worshipping the God Jesus rejects – the “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” War God – and embraced Jesus’ compassionate and loving All-Parent.

The resources freed up would be sufficient to literally transform this world into a paradise.