Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

June 22, 2020

2 Kings 17:5-8.13-15.18, Ps 60, Mt 7:1-5

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as we ponder the 13th of the 16 part focus on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is trying to get us to live by his standards, not those of the righteous scribes and Pharisees or the virtuous pagans. This week we’ll get to his synthetic conclusions. Today he tell us, “Stop judging that you may not be judged,” promising us that “as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” He is communicating to us that our receptivity, our openness, to his grace is dependent on the way we treat others. For us to receive the love of God, in other words, we must be opened through loving our neighbor. For us to receive God’s mercy, we must be merciful. That’s why Jesus tells us not to judge others, because we cannot truly be merciful unless we stop judging our brothers and sisters.

* Jesus isn’t indicating that we shouldn’t judge between right and wrong and leave all of that judging exclusively to God. God has given us the moral law precisely so that we can make moral judgments about actions. In today’s first reading, we see how God himself judges the actions of the Israelites at the time of the Assyrian invasion. Israel in the north and Samaria in the center of the Holy Land were both run over by the Assyrians “because the children of Israel sinned against the Lord their God,” the Second Book of Kings tells us, “and because they venerated other gods.”  What they did was wrong. God saw it and wants us to see it. When we see people worshipping other gods, when we see people taking advantage of the vulnerable and innocent, when we encounter people telling baldfaced lies, when we encounter terrorists trying to kill the innocent, when we see mobs vandalizing and looting stores or tearing down statues of founding fathers, when we see police officers kneeling on innocent people’s necks, he wants us absolutely to pronounce, as he does, that such actions themselves are evil.

* But while he wants us to share his judgment on the moral quality of actions, Jesus forbids us to judge people. We must leave that to God, because while we can see externally whether their action conforms or not to what God has taught us or in conscience we know to be good or evil, we can’t judge the agents, since we can never know everything that is going on inside of them. We don’t know all the interior facts. This is true for deeds that are clearly wrong: we cannot know why a person, for example, is stealing, or even why a soldier is hammering an innocent carpenter’s legs and feet to a Cross. It’s also true for deeds that are clearly good: we cannot know if someone giving alms to the poor is doing it for vainglory, if a man defending an elderly woman being attacked has ulterior motives, if a person showing up for Eucharistic adoration is doing so to hide from responsibility, family members or even the police.

* Instead of judging our neighbor, Jesus wants us to love our neighbor and show mercy to our neighbor. To do that, he tells us, we need humbly to recognize that often the temptation to judge our neighbor comes from a desire to deflect the attention from our own thoughts, behavior and sins. He says, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from...