Be Merciful, just as your Father is Merciful – 7th Sunday In Ordinary Time – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; February 23, 2025

Last Sunday in the Psalm we heard, Blessed the man who … delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on his law day and night. (Ps 1:1,2) If we truly delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it, we will also desire to fulfill it in our life and we will beg from God the grace to be faithful to his law.

In today’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus, the Son of God made man, gives us a summary of his law that goes deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees. (Mt 5:20)

Today we heard Jesus sum up his teaching with the words, Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Elsewhere he says, You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt 5:48) We must be perfect like our heavenly Father, but not equal to him, as that would be impossible. That likeness is specified in terms of “mercy.” The whole of today’s Gospel can be considered a teaching on how we are to be “merciful”. Even that likeness in terms of mercy might seem impossible, beyond our reach. Indeed, we cannot fulfill the law of the Gospel without the help of God’s grace and the working of the Holy Spirit, for which we must beg in prayer.

Before considering some of the details given us today, two preliminaries will be helpful.

The first is that when we hear something like, to the person who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic, we should take into account what the Fathers of the Church spoke of as the “preparation of the soul”. (cf. St. Augustine, On the Sermon on the Mount, 19.58-59) In other words, Our Lord gives us very vivid and concrete examples of patience in the face of injury, but the examples are illustrations not laws; what is required is that we cultivate an attitude of the heart such that we be ready to suffer such things if need be. In the words of the Psalmist, My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready. (Ps 57[56]:7)

The second is the need to recognize a minimum without being “minimalists”; or to grasp that there is perfection and there is perfection. There is the unattainable perfection of God, there is the perfection of the saints in heaven, and there is the movement towards perfection of the faithful making their way upon earth. St. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way, there is the minimum perfection that removes from the heart everything that is contrary to charity, that is every mortal sin, and this minimal perfection is necessary for salvation. Then there is the movement in the direction of removing every obstacle that holds us back from God. (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, ST IIaIIae, q184a2)

Or St. John Paul II points out that the prohibitions contained in the ten commandments are “the basic condition for love of neighbour” and “the first necessary step on the journey towards freedom, its starting-point.” (Veritatis Splendor, 13) That is the first and necessary step, the minimum. The “minimalist,” however, is the one who seeks nothing more than this minimum. To him the Lord speaks a warning, From him who has not, even what he has will be taken away from him. (Mt 25:29)

St. John Paul II, then, speaks about the direction in which the Holy Spirit moves us, starting from the minimum first step: “Those who are impelled by love and ‘walk by the Spirit’ (Gal 5:16), and who desire to serve others, find in God’s Law the fundamental and necessary way in which to practise love as something freely chosen and freely lived out. Indeed, they feel an interior urge — a genuine ‘necessity’ and no longer a form of coercion — not to stop at the minimum demands of the Law, but to live them in their ‘fullness’. This is a still uncertain and fragile journey as long as we are on earth, but it is one made possible by grace, which enables us to possess the full freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21) and thus to live our moral life in a way worthy of our sublime vocation as ‘sons in the Son’. (Veritatis Splendor, 18)

With these thoughts in mind, let us turn to meditating on the practice of mercy through loving our enemies and withholding judgment.

Today’s 1^st reading gives us an example of what love of enemies does and does not mean. Saul, the King of Israel, is seeking David to kill him because he is afraid that David wants to usurp the kingdom. Saul falls into David’s power, but David loves his enemy and spares his life.

Actually, today’s 1^st reading recounts the second time that David spared Saul’s life. On the first occasion, David and his men had not been seeking Saul, but had been hiding in a cave and by chance Saul went in the cave to relieve himself. (1 Sam 24) In today’s reading, David actually goes into Saul’s camp, so it seems that he is more strongly tempted, that he is actively seeking out Saul, but then stays his hand at the last minute. Note well, that while in both cases David spares Saul’s life, in neither case does he trust himself to Saul. In today’s reading he waits until he is at a safe distance before he lets Saul know that he spared his life.

There is another key point here: David spares Saul because he recognizes Saul as “the Lord’s anointed.” We can approximate the Hebrew by saying that he recognizes Saul as “the Lord’s messiah”, and the Greek by saying that he recognizes Saul as “the Lord’s christ.” As the anointed king of Israel, even though a wicked one, Saul represents the Christ to come, Jesus, Son of God and Savior.

Love of enemy is to be practiced out of reverence for “the Lord’s Christ”. Consider that those in holy orders, bishops and priests, share the anointing of Christ in a special way.  All the baptized as well share in the Lord’s anointing. Finally, all men, even if they have not been baptized are capable of faith and baptism and so capable of sharing the Lord’s anointing.

To love our enemies, then, means seeing beyond the present conflict, seeing beyond present wickedness, to the love and mercy of God, who desires that the person – whom we see as an enemy, from whom we seek to protect ourselves – be joined to Christ in grace and charity, and so attain his eternal salvation.

God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked and so would have us show the same kindness. We might answer and say, “Well, yes, but God can’t be hurt by the ungrateful and wicked; he has no need to protect himself.” In his own nature, yes, but by becoming man, Jesus gave us an example both of fleeing from those who sought his life and finally handing himself over to their power and letting himself be crucified. So, like David and like Christ, we can seek to protect ourselves, but we must prepare our heart and be ready, if need be, even to hand ourselves over to those who seek to harm us, confident that whatever injury we might suffer in this world nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rm 8:39)

So we must love our enemies by action, like David sparing Saul’s life, by word, and by the prayer of the heart, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, and praying for those who mistreat us. Or, starting from the minimum, we must keep our heart free from hatred and move in the direction of love and mercy. Prayer is a good starting point; when we can sincerely pray for those who seek to harm us, or have harmed us, pray for their eternal salvation, then a limit is imposed on hatred and we are on the way to removing it from our heart.

Be merciful as your Father is merciful, remembering that he does not punish us as we deserve but seeks our healing and conversion to the point of sending his Son to die on the Cross for our salvation.

This means that, for our part, we must not give up on anyone. Right now we may be powerless; right now we may be unable to do anything; right now we might be unable to foresee any realistic possibility that someone might change and be converted. Do not give up! With God all things are possible.

That refusal to give up on others also connects with the whole matter of judging. David judged that Saul was still a danger to himself; David did not judge Saul to be a lost cause. We can judge that to all appearances a person is a great sinner; we cannot judge him to be a lost cause. There are people who do very wicked things; it might be naive to believe that they are acting in ignorance; it could even be insulting to excuse them in that fashion because it denies that they are responsible for their actions. Still, we can neither judge the motive and intention of the heart, nor foresee the future of that person.

There was another Saul who shortly after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ held the cloaks of those who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr. By holding their cloaks he was in effect saying of each stone cast, “I am Saul and I approve of that stone.” Imagine being a bystander and saying to yourself, “What a wicked man that Saul is. I’m sure God has a place reserved for him in the depths of hell.”

Later Saul, pursuing Christians to death, had a little encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. From Saul the persecutor he became the great Apostle, St. Paul.

He wrote to Timothy: The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And I am the foremost of sinners; but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience. (1 Tim 1:15-16)

St. Stephen, as he died, reached the perfection of mercy, praying for Saul, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. (Acts 7:60) To travel the road from the minimum to the maximum, learning to measure out the generosity of mercy, we need to pray. Prayer is what prepares our hearts to be ready to give whatever God asks of us. In prayer, we need to ask Jesus, “Lord Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine.”