Father THOMAS IDERGARD SJ
Homily for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
2025-03-02
Year C: Ecclesiasticus 27:5-8; Ps 92; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45
St. Lars Catholic Church, Uppsala (English Mass)
Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
Early in Salvation history, God makes a covenant with the Jewish people, known to us as the Old Covenant. This indeed very small and insignificant people compared to the surrounding high cultures of Antiquity, were chosen for the faith of their forefathers, the patriarchs. First and foremost, Abraham.
The purpose of the covenant was to make Israel a holy people, set apart entirely by and for God to testify about God to the world, through which God then, when the time was right, would enter the world to fulfil the covenant’s promises and extend it to all peoples in a New and everlasting Covenant.
The Torah, the Law of Israel, mediated by Moses and explained by the prophets, was the constitution of the Old Covenant. The Law depicted a life of righteousness affirming and reflecting the will of God, likened by our responsorial psalm to a flourishing tree, growing like a “cedar of Lebanon”. The cedars of Lebanon were used as building material for the temple in Jerusalem, i.e. they sustained the visible presence of God in the world. And so does also a righteous person.
Jesus’ basic message is that he fulfils the Law. Thus, his moral teaching says nothing materially new than that which he as God had revealed with the Law. In today’s second reading from First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul explains the purpose of what we know as the Ten Commandments, the moral part of the Law: to help us understanding and recognising sin as a violation of God’s will and thus a breach of the relationship with God.
Our first reading from Ecclesiasticus described how that, which we say and do is preceded by, stems from, a particular value scale. Jesus repeats this insight in the Gospel by talking about the person’s “heart”, a Biblical image of the most fundamental personal core. When fully in harmony with God’s will as God intended it to be, the heart can produce actions exceeding the commandments of the Law, as our Lord describes in the Sermon on the Mount; jump over a higher bar than that set by the Law. Like e.g.: turning the other cheek, loving and forgiving the enemy, never accepting divorce, making God our only role model or “influencer” to follow etc.
This is a new freedom, a freedom from sinful behaviour when the root cause of sin, our damaged relationship with God, is dealt with. A freedom in and to God’s own way of being; God’s own righteousness. The perfection which God the Father possesses and we shall aim at, as Jesus has pointed out clearly.
We cannot achieve this by ourselves, as it indeed is superhuman. And that is why Jesus makes a substantial, totally decisive, addition to the Jewish faith of the Old Covenant. This addition is Jesus Christ himself and the supernatural grace that only becomes available, possible for us to partake in, by God uniting himself with, completely giving himself to, created matter; to us. Christ is thus our help to live the Law fully. For a freedom to a life where deeds become righteous because of something else than the Law itself; something that is added from the outside to work from within of us.
Supernatural grace directs and empowers our will so that our human nature can become what it once was created to be, viz. “shareholder”, as it were, in divine life. Grace is conveyed by the seven sacraments of the Church, instituted and ordered by Christ himself for that very purpose. First and foremost, through the Sacrament of baptism, and constantly renourished by the Sacrament of reconciliation and the Holy Eucharist.
Grace is not “magic”. It must be activated by our personal response to God’s offer, i.e. our faith manifested in good works. This is what Catholic teaching labels a “living faith”. Living faith is a building block of the Kingdom of God and proclaims Christ to others to enable them to reach salvation. This is the greatest act of love that one ever can do. Nothing can be more important and precious to anyone than eternal life of joy.
By contrast, Jesus, as we heard in the Gospel, calls a faith that only pays lip service, that does not even try where it is difficult, hypocritical. It cannot help others to a living faith, for the blind cannot lead the blind.
Note that Jesus does not want you to be content with removing the wooden beam from your own eye. No, he says that when you see clearly, when your faith is alive, you should also take splinter out of your neighbour’s eye.
We Christians are called to love, to will the good of the other which ultimately is salvation. True love demands that we help each other repenting through judgements about each other’s deeds in relation to God’s commandments, while remembering that we always know more about our own shortcomings than about those of others. To “judge”, contrariwise, is to pronounce the eternal destiny of other souls – heaven or hell – which is to take the place of God the Father. And that is a sin. But to mutually point out areas of apparent improvements in our relations to God, ourselves and others is according to Catholic and Biblical teaching a work of mercy, and not to “judge”!
In the Season of Lent, beginning on Wednesday, we are helped to train ourselves in the spiritual and corporeal works of mercy to cultivate our Christian virtues, i.e. our inclination to choose God’s will over anything else, in what we say and do. In a pastoral letter for Lent, available on the web site of our parish and our diocese, our bishop, Anders Cardinal Arborelius, depicts Lent as a time for preparation for a true trust in the Easter message of resurrection from the dead. A trust that acts.
If we try to detach from perishable things and to better live the way of the cross of our Lord, by abstaining from unnecessary habits or adding new, good and edifying habits, we will “grow into a deeper communion with Jesus who came to serve and not to be served”, Bishop Anders writes. This builds up the “store of goodness” in our hearts, yes, it will even be “overfull”, which gives hope amid both internal and external darkness. A hope that the bishop reminds us we are called to share “to all those who suffer and are tried, who hunger and thirst and grope their way in darkness and uncertainty”.
Therefore, he concludes, by cutting attachments to selfish needs we will allow Jesus to prepare us for the great joy in discovering “our own personal vocation and possibility to share the message of Easter”, as a fruit of Lent. And Bishop Anders exhorts us to already now, as we are about to enter this holy season, “thank God for showing us this trust”. Amen.