My sermon for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A:The gospel reading today brings to a close a long and important section of Saint Matthew's Gospel: Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.
This great exposition of Jesus' moral teaching covers chapters five, six and seven of Matthew's Gospel and there are some disadvantages in dividing it into several short segments, as in the gospel readings for Mass over the last five or six Sundays. It's a good idea to read all three chapters together, to get a picture of the whole charter of Christian moral life, or the way of God's Kingdom.
What Jesus seems to warn his followers about here, at the end of his Sermon, is a tendency that's probably very easy for religious believers to fall into: the tendency to give lip-service to God, to offer gestures of loyalty and friendship and praise to God while actually ignoring his will and pursuing our own self-interest, our own pleasure and happiness.
We might say that the worldly-minded person, the person with a purely commonsense code of ethics, is the person who looks after his own welfare, and that of the people he's closest to. He makes use of the opportunities that come his way that bring advantage to himself and his own, and avoids risks or sacrifices that might bring disadvantage. It's possible to live by that code and still be a basically decent, honest and even occasionally generous person.
But that's different from the code of God's Kingdom the way Jesus proclaimed it. Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you....if someone takes your tunic, give him your cloak as well...don't worry about money and food and clothes but trust in God to provide you with with what you need...all the teaching of Christ that the gospel readings have put before us over the last few Sundays. What concerns Christ is that his followers might well say their prayers and observe their religious obligations all right, but in their daily conduct and their relationships with other people, follow the same worldly rule of life that men and women with no commitment to God follow.
Jesus knows, of course, that the values and the way of life of the Kingdom don't come naturally to us, because acting against our own self-interest doesn't come naturally to us. Conversion to God's Kingdom usually takes a long time, and God is infinitely patient towards our failures, our compromises, the struggles we have against our resistance to the high standards of the Kingdom.
So the second point that Jesus makes in this passage is important as well: that the person who listens to his words and acts on them is like a man who builds a house on rock. The way of the Kingdom might be difficult but ultimately it's the only solid foundation for life, and the only way that will lead us to communion with God - the goal at the heart of Christian life.
I think that's very relevant in the context of our present society because if there's a general attitude towards morality at the present time it's an attitude of what a lot of people would call "realism".
Listening to so many of the pundits and opinion-formers in the media, you easily get the impression that we've all lost faith in the ability of human nature to rise above it's self-serving tendencies. There's often an outright hostility towards any kind of moral absolutes, or and set of values that invite us to transcend our selfish appetites and motives. And of course people can dignify this attitude of aiming low in our moral behaviour by saying that they're only being realistic.
In this context all the Church community can do is to go on preaching, and hopefully living, the ideals that Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount. The human vocation isn't just to be rich and famous and physically attractive and all the other worldly aspirations that our culture seems to be obsessed by. Our vocation is to resist those kinds of temptation, to rise above them, and to take God's holiness as the standard that we measure ourselves by. It might be an uphill struggle, but anything less involves selling ourselves short.
This is the message that Jesus finishes off his Sermon on the Mount with, and maybe its especially appropriate for us to reflect on with the season of Lent starting again on Wednesday this week, when we're supposed to question ourselves about the progress we're making in our spiritual and moral life, and re-commit ourselves to the way of God's Kingdom.
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