Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
February 20, 2022 11:00 am · Sergio Muñoz Fita
The Gospel presented to us today by the Church is one of those pages in which the teaching is so rich that one could take a single verse and find material for personal meditation for weeks, months, or even years.
Dear brothers and sisters, faith is the gateway to a new life. This life is a gift that God offers to man so that by receiving it, he may attain peace in this life and eternal happiness in Paradise. This happiness consists in communion with the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who created us out of love, and who invites us to a relationship of charity with him that transforms and elevates us.
In human beings, there is a natural capacity for love. Love at this level is the capacity to desire what is good, and to love those who love us. It is evident that it is not necessary to be a Christian to love in this way: Jesus refers to this when he says: "even sinners love those who love them".
Charity, however, is not a natural love, but a participation in the very love of the Most Holy Trinity. When this love reaches its perfection, man is capable of loving as God himself loves. The Lord also alludes to this when he says: “love your enemies (…) and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”
Today the Lord does not speak to us of simply loving one another, but to do so with the love of God. Charity enables us to love beyond our natural capacities. It enables us to reach heights which, on our own, we would not be able to reach. It not only enables us to love more; above all, it helps us to love better. It enables us to love our executioners, those who desire our annihilation, those who hate us, those who have humiliated us, those who have abandoned us, those who are trying to harm us. It makes us love like Christ crucified, whose first words after being nailed to the tree of the cross were these: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." (Lk 23:34)
Having said that, I invite you to think about your enemies. The term “enemy” can designate a person who hates us, but also a person who has hurt us. In the first case, perhaps some of you who are listening to me do not have enemies, but in the second meaning, we all have enemies and we have all been enemies of someone.
We are all wounded. Those wounds have a history, and they also have the face of someone who inflicted them on us: a parent, a child, a sibling, a relative, a co-worker, a priest, a friend, a bishop, your husband or wife, your boyfriend or girlfriend, an acquaintance or a stranger. They are wounds and they are faces that speak of people who abused you, or who made you feel unloved. Someone who said words that made you suffer, or who humiliated you, or who were unfaithful to you, or who left you alone when you most needed their company, or who betrayed your trust, or who put you aside, or who laughed while you were crying, or who were harsh and unjust to you, or who simply made you suffer without meaning to do so.
All these wounds need to be healed, and the only remedies capable of this healing are love and mercy. When I say "love and mercy", of course, I am referring to the charity of God, because without it, we alone are not able to escape that circle of sin and selfishness in which we human beings are enclosed.
It is a gift that we ask for in prayer, that we receive in the sacraments, that we develop in the practice of virtue, that becomes strong in difficulties overcome in union with Christ. Without a Christian life taken seriously, we will respond to the evil we suffer as do the children of this world. We will judge those who judge us. We will condemn those who condemn us. We will hate and will not be able to forgive.
Allow me one last thought, which I have been considering in my personal prayer this week while meditating on these readings: it is true that there is no love of charity without prayer, sacraments, self-denial and the practice of virtues. There is also a great obstacle in our hearts to Christian love, and that is pride.
Too often, the reason we do not forgive, or love our enemies, is our wounded pride. When he asks us today to love those who have hurt us, the Lord is pointing directly to that mountain of pride within us that blocks us from access to love and forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.
The foundation of Christian love is humility. Humility to smile at those who have just broken our hearts. Humility not to want to say the last word. Humility not to get angry when we are forgotten. Humility to stop condemning others for defects that we ourselves also have. Humility to rejoice when we are left out. Humility to bless those who curse us. Humility to be silent, or to obey, or to suffer in silence, and to do so with joy. Humility to love when we are not loved; to reciprocate when we are not reciprocated; to remain faithful even in the face of infidelity.
This is the summit to which I referred earlier, and which is reached only by those who love in union with the meek and humble Heart of Jesus. No Heart has loved more than the Heart of the Lord, precisely because no Heart has been as humble as His.
Let us ask the Lord, in this Holy Mass, for the humility we need to love as he does and in union with him. Only in this way will we find peace in the midst of suffering, and deserve to receive some day that “packed together, shaken down and overflowing” measure that Jesus has promised to the humble in the joys of heaven.