Homily
6th Sunday of Ordinary Time
St. Lawrence Chapel at the University of Kansas
13 February 2011
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. In a way, the Lord might as well be telling a sixth grade basketball team to go out and find a way to beat the mighty Kansas Jayhawks. Nobody knew the law better than the scribes and Pharisees. They were the lawyers, the law enforcement, and the best observers of the law. Nobody cared about the law of Moses, to which Jesus refers throughout today's Gospel, more than the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus, as he oftentimes does, puts before his disciples an impossible task, like 6th graders taking the court against the Jayhawks, but says there is a way for the impossible to become possible. As great as the scribes and Pharisees are, they have not resisted sin and observed the law to the point of shedding their own blood. They have not given 110% as coaches often say. So Jesus uses hyperbole to show the kind of effort to be righteous that his disciples must give. If necessary, they should gouge their eyes and cut off their hands, and when we see our own Lord stripped and beaten on the cross in order that he might fulfill all righteousness, we know that our Lord even when using hyperbole is telling us that we can always try harder.
Still, there is an aura of hyperbole and impossibility in today's Gospel that makes us want to search for its deeper meaning. Those sixth graders might go out on the court believing that they can win, and doing everything that they can think to do to beat the Jayhawks, but might never beat the experts, the pros. So also is our chance of exceeding the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees who care about the moral law more than the average Joe in the pew. In the moral life, trying to be perfect is like being those sixth graders trying to be the Jayhawks. And if we were advising ourselves, most of us would say that you don't beat the Jayhawks by playing harder, but by playing smarter. The best solution if you don't have the players to beat them is to recruit a player to help you, preferably the greatest player who ever played the game, a player who makes everyone around him better, a player who makes winning a real possibility again.
Jesus tells us to do impossible things, but he never commands that we do them alone. He tells his disciples that they must be perfect, as their heavenly Father is perfect, or they will not be worthy of the kingdom of heaven, while at the same time also telling them that without Him they can do nothing, and that no one approaches the perfect Father except through him. Jesus not only challenges his disciples to perfectly fulfill the moral law, to perfectly do good and avoid evil, even to the point of beating the pros, he more importantly tells them that he will be the captain of the team, that without him they really have no chance, but that with him all things are possible.
So while it is important for us to resist sin as much as we can, to renew the promises of our baptism to refuse to be mastered by sin, to hate our sins with a perfect hate, and to not allow the evil one to push us around and turn us into someone we never wanted to be, it is our relationship with the Lord who has the victory over sin that is most important. Those who want to be holy and successful in the moral life realize that every struggle in the moral life, doing good and avoiding evil, points to a more fundamental struggle in the spiritual life, a struggle to trust God, and to welcome him into every area of our lives. To exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees means trying harder, yes, even to the point of shedding our blood, but more importantly, it means allowing Christ who has already shed his blood, and his perfections to be more present to us, and to allow Him, the best player on our team, to do more in us and with us and through us.
There is no reason, then, for us to get frustrated with our weakness, with our own sinfulness. There is no reason for us to hate ourselves more than we hate our sins, which is what the evil one would like us to do. In our battle to be holy, of course we should be calling timeouts, making adjustments in our strategy, practicing harder, and drawing up new plays. But most of all, we should know that Christ Himself is on the bench ready for us to put him in play in the time and circumstances of our lives.
It is the spiritual life, a life of prayer, and a life of true discipleship that is most important. Through a spiritual life we tend to forget ourselves because we are truly following the Lord and are attentive to what he is doing. It is the spiritual life that allows for the greatest progress in the moral life, becoming the people we really want to be. In a sense, because Jesus always was, and is, and will be, the one who fulfills all righteousness, and because at every moment He is in conversation with His heavenly Father and fulfilling the will of His Heavenly Father, then it is not really up to us to find our own individual way to be perfect by our own power. It is a matter of plugging into his perfection, of our entering into something that is already being accomplished. It is a matter of allowing the Holy Spirit to overshadow us as it did Mary.
Mary then in the moral life, since she was sinless, is our pattern of holiness. She is our nearest example. We think of Mary not as one who had supernatural power over sin, although the gifts of the Holy Spirit made her incredibly strong. We do not think of her as always doing right when mere mortals would falter, although this is also true. We think of her instead as the lowly handmaiden of the Lord, who allows the Lord to help her, who allows the Lord to share his perfections with her because he loves her. We think of her as being placed in the middle of this incredible conversation and mission of love between the Father and the Son, and so she is full of grace, filled with the Holy Spirit, and she accomplished more by her fiat than the strongest scribe or Pharisee could ever accomplish by his willpower or attention to the law.
Let us move forward in this Eucharist toward being the people we deeply want to be, by realizing that our Lord Jesus is just as ready to fulfill all righteousness in us, by the power of his suffering, death and resurrection, as he was ready to fill the sinless heart of the virgin Mary. Unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we are not fit to enter the kingdom of heaven.
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