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Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary-
Homilies |
"True
Righteousness: Beyond the Exterior to the Depths of the Heart"
Homily for the
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Jonathan L. Reardon
February 13, 2011
Year A
On February 3rd 1959,
at 35,000ft above the Atlantic, Captain Lynch took a last look
at the flight panel of the Boeing 707. The co-pilot was studying
a map. Captain Lynch decided to stretch his legs, thinking that
the worst was over. Shortly after leaving Paris they had run
into a very strong headwind. But by now they had climbed above
the storm. The captain made his way down the aisle between the
rows of seats. All the passengers still had the seatbelts
fastened. At the back a baby was crying in its mother’s arms and
the captain reassured her saying, “It will be better now. Your
baby will be able to sleep.” Just then Captain felt the right
wing tip and he was thrown against the seats on the right hand
side. At the same moment all the lights in the plane went out.
Next he found himself lying on the floor. At least he thought it
was the floor. But then he realized it was the ceiling. The
Boeing had flipped and was dropping like a stone. When he made
it back to the cockpit, he found the co-pilot had been knocked
unconscious. He came to again and he and the captain managed to
bring the Boeing back to normal. The aircraft dropped 29,000ft
but finally at 6,000ft Captain Lynch regained control of the
aircraft. A few more seconds and the plane would have crashed
into the Atlantic. The whole incident lasted four minutes. What
caused it? While the co-pilot was studying the map he did not
notice the blue light on the indicator panel warning that the
automatic pilot had become disengaged.
God has given us an indicator panel to guide us through life and
prevent us from getting turned upside down and crashing. That
indicator panel is the Commandments. The Commandments are a gift
from God to help us enjoy life by not getting lost along the
way. Which is why Jesus challenges our notion of righteousness.
The notion of righteousness in Scripture is essentially
religious. A person who is righteous is one who sincerely
strives to do the will of God, which is discovered in the
commandments, in the duties of a person’s state in life and of
course, through personal prayer. A person who is righteous
follows the path that God has set forth, with fidelity to the
Law of Moses centered on the Ten Commandments. Jesus’ comment
about righteousness in today’s Gospel would have been quite
harsh to the scribes and Pharisees of His time. He is pointing
to the fact they had a distorted vision and practice of the Law
– putting the whole emphasis on the external, ritual observance.
For them, exact and hyper-detailed but external fulfillment of
the Law was a guarantee of a person’s salvation. It is as if
they were on autopilot, saying: “if I simply do this, I am a
holy person and God is duty-bound to save me.” For a person with
this attitude, sanctification does not come from God but rather
that person “saves himself” through these external practices.
The problem is that the scribes and Pharisees have not let the
practice of the Law sink into their hearts. Their intention is
not to do the will of God, not follow His path but to do what
they have to in order to fulfill the Law.
Jesus therefore challenges them – and us – to go beyond the
external, to move past simply going through the motions and sink
deeply in our hearts. To let this happen we begin with something
that we already have – faith. Pope Benedict teaches us that the
New Testament concept of righteousness is faith. For faith is
walking with Christ, having Him by our side – in whom the entire
Law is fulfilled. Our faith in Christ unites us to His own
righteousness – to His holiness. But the challenge that He
issues us is that we have to choose it. Everyday we are faced
with many choices and challenges, temptations and trials of all
sorts – things that may or not test our faith, our fidelity to
Christ. The question that we must ask ourselves, however, is
that these challenges, these choices that we face each day, if
they do test our faith and our fidelity to Christ, then what is
our attitude towards them? Do we have the same attitude as that
of the scribes and Pharisees – the very people Jesus rebukes in
today’s Gospel – our is that of the exhortation found in our
first reading – where we are encouraged to choose to keep the
commandments of God, encouraged to trust in Him and live in His
grace. This is what Jesus means when He says: “your
righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees.”
As if to say: holiness in this life and salvation come from God,
are gift of His grace and we are called to choose to cooperate
with that grace, with God’s favor by following Him with sincere
hearts, living our lives in fidelity to His commandments, by
communicating with Him through personal prayer and reception of
the Sacraments – to walk with Christ in faith, everyday of our
lives. If we but trust Him a little more each day, if we choose
to be faithful, if we let the practices of our faith sink deeply
into our hearts and overcome the temptation to just go through
the motions, to reduce our faith to external practice only. If
we choose this path we will discover, as St. Paul mentions in
our second reading, the wisdom of God. We will find, not so
surprisingly, that this is the path that leads to our interior
freedom – a freedom of the heart and true righteousness, true
holiness.
As we enter into a deep, personal dialogue with God during the
celebration of this Mass, let us ask Him that we may the grace
to turn off the autopilot and move beyond the external practices
of our faith and choose to follow the commandments, to walk with
Christ everyday, so that our hearts may be united to His.
