Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/021311.shtml

How much?

How much do we have to give God, how closely do we have to follow His commandments? How much will be asked of us to be holy, how much will we have to sacrifice? Everything, all of them, everything, all of it.

This is the message today: there is no halfway to Heaven. We have before us fire and water, Heaven or Gehenna. Gehenna was the place in Jerusalem where people came to throw away their trash. It was a huge pit, that burned day and night. This is what Jesus puts before us, to be members of the kingdom of Heaven, or trash to be burned away.

We read the Gospel and immediately want to soften it. “He can’t mean literally cut out your eye, Jesus just wants us to do everything we can to avoid sin.” “He can’t mean that looking at a woman with lust is the same as adultery, He’s just over exaggerating to make His point.”

But this is the point, that Jesus sees clearly He cannot overemphasize. The stakes are too high; if you cannot keep from looking at a woman in lust, if everything fails before your desire, absolutely cut it out. You must do whatever you have to, to avoid the fire. Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. We are now not only bound by the letter, but by the spirit as well.

It’s easy to think that this kind of absolute holiness is only meant for a select few. In the Church, we have priests and monks and nuns who we expect to be holy, but we don’t hold ourselves to the same standard. Because we are not consecrated to God, we feel that the bar is set lower for us. We only have to be mostly good, because only a few people can be Mother Teresas.

That is a lie. “No one does he command to act unjustly,/ to none does he give license to sin.” We are a holy kingdom, and by our Confirmation we are made a royal priesthood. We are all ministers of God, and clergy are only supposed to be ministers to members of the Church. Perfection is demanded of all of us, however sinful we may feel.

And that’s the issue. No one feels good enough to be perfect. Too much of the time, it’s hard enough to just be ok. We are asked to be pure water in a brackish pond, and it’s hard to separate ourselves from the muck. How can we be in the world and not of it?

But God has revealed His wisdom through the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit bubbles up within us as a pure fountain. We are purified because Christ is holy, and He is in us. God is MIGHTY and we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, even perfection.

The past few weeks the readings have circled around the idea of obedience to God. Obedience teaches us humility, and forces us to make room for God in our lives. We can only be perfect if He is there, and obedience not only teaches how to be perfect, like a parent teaches a child to pray by folding their hands for them, but frees us from the burden of perfection by ourselves.

The glory of what we believe is that we are not alone. Jesus is with us, in our suffering on the cross, and in our joy in our hearts. Perfection does not always have to be drudgery, but it can also be joy. When the law becomes our desire, and not our command, that is when we are progressing along the path of the Lord.

How much shall we give? Everything, because the stakes could not be higher.

But we are not alone, and the Church walks together with each other and Jesus in poverty and perfection.