Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 23, 2025

2025 Feb 23 SUN: SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
1 Sm 26: 2. 7-9. 12-13. 22-23/ Ps 103: 1-2. 3-4. 8. 10. 12-13 (8a)/ 1 Cor 15: 45-49/ Lk 6: 27-38

HOMILIST'S NOTE: I ran afoul of Pope Francis's directive from his general audience of December 4, 2024, when he said that a homily should be in the six-to-eight-minute range.  This one ran over 12 minutes.

We all know that at every weekend Mass following the Profession of Faith, we have a prayer that goes by a lot of different names. You've heard it called the Prayers of the Faithful. It's also called the Universal Prayer. If you go to other English-speaking countries, you may hear it called the Bidding Prayers. My favorite term for it is the General Intercessions.

Now for some months I have been writing the general intercessions and I believe in keeping them concise and for the lector who has those prayers, I want to make sure it's on just one sheet of paper, one side of the one sheet of paper. And in fact when I'm keeping it concise, I'm able to present it in a pretty good-sized font. So much the better for the lectors.

But this weekend they're running a little bit longer and they're in a little smaller font. I had some parishioners of Saint Jerome say to me that they wanted to supply some intercessions of their own for this particular weekend, the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, the year of Luke, because of the emphasis we have today on the mercy of God. We've heard this in the first reading. We're aware of how King Saul, the first king of Israel, was obsessed with his belief that David was a rival to him and that he had to kill David. And so we have this Scripture today about that deep slumber that the Lord put Saul and his men into and in which David and his assistant were able to come right up to Saul and they could have killed him, but they did not.

We also hear from First Corinthians today about the fact that you and I have to move from being the first Adam to being the second Adam. That is, we need to be transformed by the gift of salvation in Jesus. We must be transformed. We must experience conversion. And, you might say, become a surprise even to ourselves. 

So there is an awful lot in the gospel and it starts with love your enemies. Three years ago I think I said that I misread that for a very, very long time. I was thinking it said "don't have enemies" and I put it on myself to go make peace. No, that doesn't work. No, if you are a genuine Christian you will have enemies. And what you can do for them is love them. Particularly as we think about what we're witnessing in our country these days, we do have to ask about God's gift of mercy and about whether it has taken hold. And I'm thinking of two of the principals right now in this process we're seeing. And based on the reading I have done about the upbringing of these two people, it appears to me that in their upbringing they never had mercy shown to them. And that is a serious deficiency in character. They may never have known mercy as they were growing up. And it's possible that in more recent times people have attempted to show them mercy but they didn't understand it. So we need to acknowledge these facts and we need to look at the rest of the things here in this gospel. There's an awful lot. 

turning the other cheek and giving to people. These are things that, again, I tended to misinterpret these. I thought it meant I had to be a doormat. Actually when you turn the other cheek you're offering a challenge. You give the attacker something to think about. And then, yes, with giving, it doesn't mean that you abandon any sense that you have rights and dignity of your own. It means that you know that life is much more than your possessions. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Now that's been called the golden rule, but Jesus didn't call it the golden rule. We know that Jesus as an infant received gold but he demonstrated through the course of his life that he was not interested in gold. So I don't know whether calling it the golden rule is any great compliment; but this is something that makes total sense to us as we try to grow in a sense of empathy, to see our neighbor as another self and to respond to them as we would like to be responded to. And I think that keeps us at a level of realistic, kind interaction which does respect the other. And that gifts will be given to you that full measure falling into your lap: For me that is quite simply the sense of peace which I have discovered in myself, and it is a wonderful thing when we discover it, because all of us can enter into an anxious state in which we are placing pressure on ourselves. When we are saying we have to do A, B or C in order to prove that I have the right to be here, that anxiety is existing in all of us and we are greatly blessed when we can come to see that as something that we use to block the very peace of our God. It is wonderful when we can lay that anxiety aside. So we have so much to think about and as we sang in the Psalm, "The Lord is kind and merciful." And we need to reflect on the people who have shown us mercy,  and realize that it [mercy] is real and that it is transforming and that as much as so many people in the world are moved by other influences, we know we give a witness that says peace is possible and peace begins with what is going on in your own heart.