Monday June 13, 2005 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Reading (2 Corinthians 6:1-10) Gospel (St. Matthew 5:38-42)
In the Gospel reading today, Our Lord lays out for us what it really
means if we are going to be His follower. It means we have to give. And it
means that we have to go, as He points out, the extra mile. When we think about
how things would be on the natural level, first of all, we would try to hang
onto what we have. If someone wants your coat, what would you do? Well, instead
of saying, “Hang onto it and keep it for yourself,” the Lord says, Give him
your cloak as well.
If someone wants to press you into service for one mile, instead of kicking and
screaming and seeing how little you can get away with, the Lord says, Go with
him for two miles.
In other words, it is a matter of taking the charity and taking it to
the extreme so that people have to wonder what it is you are doing and why. In
wondering about these sorts of things, then what they are going to have to do
is realize that it is not for any natural reason that you are doing what you
are doing, but rather it is out of love for God. The thing He wants us to bring
into the world is that love for the Lord. And the way we are going to show that
is not by doing the absolute minimum, but rather it is by being truly
charitable, by showing the love of God in the way we act and in the way we
live.
This is not an easy thing for us to do. Just think of all the
opportunities that we would have everyday to really be able to exercise this
kind of charity: the kind of patience that we could show to somebody, the
kindness that we could show to somebody, whatever it might be. There are
countless opportunities everyday to be able to be truly charitable, to be
Christian in the fullest sense of what that means. We begin to understand, as
we apply these things to ourselves, that if the Lord is really asking of us to
go a step further, to practice true and heroic Christian charity, we see how
often we fail even in the smallest little things. We do not have to worry about
giving up a cloak or going an extra mile – we have to worry about
saying a kind word, maintaining our joy, maintaining our patience, just simply
being charitable. That is what Our Lord is asking of us: to die to self, to die
to our own selfish desires so that we can serve another, so that we can do what
is right for another.
That is not easy, but it is exactly what
Saint Paul is talking about. He says, In
everything we commend ourselves as ministers of God, through endurance in
afflictions, hardships, constraints, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors,
vigils, fasts, and goes on from there. Again, he is saying that in
the midst of all of these things we still have to present ourselves in a
certain way. If he is presenting himself as a minister of God, that means he is
not swearing at somebody, he is not cussing, he is not cursing, he is accepting
things, he is being charitable, kind, patient, joyful, and so on. This is
exactly what Scripture tells us. Remember when he was beat with rods and thrown
into prison and chained down, at midnight he was singing hymns in thanksgiving
and praise to God. How many of us could do that?
That is the kind of thing Our Lord is looking
for, to make sure we keep our focus on Him and that we keep our proper disposition
regardless of the situation. When we try to do that, we will find out just how
far we really have to go in this whole process of growth in virtue, of growth
in holiness. But that is what Christian life is all about: to keep our focus on
God, to do everything in God, and to do everything in such a way that anyone
who is looking at us or experiencing what we do will recognize that what we are
doing and the reason why we are doing it is all about Jesus Christ.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.