SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME C

[cappie]

In contemporary Australian culture, media and advertisers tell us that, in order to have a happy life, we need to be wealthy, and if we cannot be wealthy, then we should have enough followers to make us a social media influencer, which usually ends in some kind of wealth anyway.  The insidiousness of privilege based on wealth and justice through retaliation and not reconciliation is reflected from our current culture back to us. There is no place for God here. So, what does this mean for a follower of Jesus?

 No matter which time period we are in, reconciliation is a process and can take many forms. Many people believe reconciliation means going back to being the way you were or forgetting what happened and moving forward from there. In a world of violence, reconciliation can only come after an attack and must be desired by both parties – if it happens at all. Better yet, is there a way to avoid needing to reconcile in the first place? Jesus speaks of a different way of responding when facing violence to the heart, body, and/or spirit.  The story of David and Saul in today’s First Reading functions almost like a parable. Showing mercy to his deadly foe, David gives a concrete example of what Jesus expects to become a way of life for His disciples.

Today’s Gospel challenges the disciples and us to think beyond the culture of violence in which they lived. Luke is writing to the communities of Gentile Christians in Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor. A question for this community was: Could they be both Christians and good citizens of the empire in which they lived? Systems of ethical teachings circulated widely throughout Greco-Roman and Jewish societies during Jesus’ life and the first centuries of early Christian tradition. Luke’s theme of discipleship is clear and has Jesus going even beyond the ethical standards of the day. Both then and now, Jesus’ instructions about accumulating wealth and possessions and responding to hostility can sound weak or simple. However, when we dig deeper into what Jesus is teaching, there is nothing passive about his aggressive commitment to non-violence and his repudiation of using wealth and privilege as power over others.

 Jesus’ teaching is radical because he invites us into a very active and power-full response to these things. As disciples, we are not asked to roll over and accept violence; instead, Jesus lists the ways we may be attacked and then tells us to actively do something additional, something that those who oppose us do not expect. Non-violent action directly combats the dark underbelly of materialism and hostility. This has been proven effective in large and small ways.   The life of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu also showed us numerous examples of non-violent response, especially in his longstanding work of opposing the state-sponsored racism known as apartheid in his native South Africa. Jesus, of course, gives us other examples in our Gospel today.

An individual making a non-violent response makes a difference, and a group of people does even more. This is where our behavior as disciples is key. Both Jesus and Archbishop Tutu teach us how to actively counter violence with non-violence. What would the world look like if we actually did this as individuals, groups, and communities? People notice how and when we respond to the violence and corruption of the world around us.  In the context of today’s liturgy, we’re all “Sauls”—by our sinfulness and pride we make ourselves enemies of God. But we’ve been spared  God has loved and shown mercy to His enemies, “the ungrateful and the wicked,” as Jesus says.

Jesus showed us this love in His Passion, forgiving His enemies as they stripped Him  and condemned Him to death on a cross   “He redeems your life from destruction,” David reminds us in today’s Psalm.

That’s the promise, too, of today’s second reading: that we who believe in the “last Adam,” Jesus, will rise from the dead in His image, as today we bear the image of the “first Adam,” who by his sin made God an enemy and brought death into the world.