As Preached by Sr, Rebecca
July 8, 2016
Holy Wisdom Church
Today’s Gospel is a continuation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount found in chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s Gospel. These three chapters, beginning with the Beatitudes form a kind of Magna Carta in the communities of the converted Jews in the second half of the first century in Galilee and in Syria.
Matthew’s community like our own is composed of Christians dedicated to Christ on a journey of transformation.
The lived community experience of todays Gospel is the touchstone. It embraces 3 different aspects:
1. Do not focus on the splinter in your brother/sister’s eye (1-5), rather turn your attention the log in your own eye.
2. Do not throw your pearls in front of pigs (6)
3. Bring your needs to God as a trusting son and daughter. (7-11)
Now let’s Explore the 1st imperative:
‘Do not judge”. Jesus, here, is addressing rash, reckless, and foolhardy judgments. Rigid opinions and negative judgments darken the heart. The contracted, critical part of our small minds is the distorting lens that magnifies our differences and if we are really aware of our body/mind we can actually feel the disharmony within ourselves. Trying to figure out people with our short sighted minds throws a veil over our own hearts. Focusing on the errors of others also minimizes in our small minds our fallibility, our own vulnerability. A teacher once said that a habit of negative judging is an occupational disease of some serious religious people. Especially in our times of chaos all over the planet we need to use all our powers of presence to live from the heart.
We need see God revealing our own blind spots to us, those shadow areas in our life that we have failed to see. If we go after them with a sense of willfulness, anger, self-depreciation we risk obstructing our God given gifts. Jesus puts it: “if you try to pull out the weeds, you might pull out the wheat along with it. (Mt 13:29).
Rilke expresses this to a young poet: “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”
2. The second imperative: “Do not throw your pearls to swine”. In Hebrew there is a play on words here: pearl and treasure share the same consonants. What is this treasure we need to honor and not expose to just any person or in any situation?
This treasure is one’s intimate relationship with God.
In Ps. 119: I lay your word as a treasure upon my heart. We lay God’s Word upon our heart, and in a sacred moment our hearts open, this word sinks into the heart, and transforms it.
This pearl that Jesus is talking about is like the metaphor of a seed as in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. It needs the dark and the depth of the soil in order to germinate and become the mature plant that it is meant to become. The seeds that fall on the road, the rock, and the thorns all are trampled on, or wither.
The gift of God’s grace is a treasure to be honed and honored in solitude and silence.
3. The third imperative: Jesus urges us to ask, seek and knock and trust that the door of grace will be opened to us. When we don’t know how to deal with a situation, we tend to contract and go into the insular within ourselves. This makes us less available to grace. We must find a balance between self-effort and trust, openness and reliance on the grace of God.
Jesus throughout the Gospel teaches us to think of grace, God’s presence as woven into the fabric of reality. There is the reality of the daily 24/7, and there is grace, which is wider and deeper than our limited sense of self.
When we rely on ourselves to figure out how to deal with any particular problem in our lives, this leads to hopelessness and even despair. On the other hand when we leave everything up to the grace of God, then we shirk responsibility and we can go to sleep, become passive, numb.
This is a paradox: we need to question, seek understanding, but sooner or later we come to a dead end, a humbling sense of fallibility, perhaps even failure. We need to look inward, feel our desires, and engage in the struggle in dealing with them. But we also need to experience that we cannot with our small minds solve any dilemma. Sometimes we may even cry out: “Oh God, where are you in this mess?” We feel alone and empty. Then out of the blue, the grace of God breaks through. Grace, beauty and a quality of love permeates us. There is a moment of aliveness resonating within us. Chronos time merges with Kairos time as Br. Luke in his homily mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
St. Teresa of Avila says that in any given difficult situation, we need to engage all our faculties as though everything depends on us and yet we need to surrender and trust as though everything depends on God.
I like to offer a true story: Fr. William Johnson SJ taught world religions at the University of Tokyo for many years. He also started there a daily meditation group. All were welcome, Christians or not. One day a young man came in, introduced himself to Fr. Johnson asking if he could come. He said he was very depressed, that life was a daily struggle, his girlfriend had left him, he hated his job etc. and really he had no desire to live. Coming here was the last attempt to do something about his miserable life. He asked Fr. what he should do during this silent time: Fr. Johnson said: recite this phrase: “Today is a beautiful day”. It doesn’t matter if you do not believe it, nor feel it; just do it. This young man came every day. Weeks later the man comes up to Father Johnson saying: “thank you”. My external situation is the same yet “truly today is a beautiful day”. This man’s ‘small mind has descended into his heart. Nothing changed but everything has changed.
‘Do not judge”. Jesus, here, is addressing rash, reckless, and foolhardy judgments. Rigid opinions and negative judgments darken the heart. The contracted, critical part of our small minds is the distorting lens that magnifies our differences and if we are really aware of our body/mind we can actually feel the disharmony within ourselves. Trying to figure out people with our short sighted minds throws a veil over our own hearts. Focusing on the errors of others also minimizes in our small minds our fallibility, our own vulnerability. A teacher once said that a habit of negative judging is an occupational disease of some serious religious people. Especially in our times of chaos all over the planet we need to use all our powers of presence to live from the heart.
We need see God revealing our own blind spots to us, those shadow areas in our life that we have failed to see. If we go after them with a sense of willfulness, anger, self-depreciation we risk obstructing our God given gifts. Jesus puts it: “if you try to pull out the weeds, you might pull out the wheat along with it. (Mt 13:29).
Rilke expresses this to a young poet: “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”
2. The second imperative: “Do not throw your pearls to swine”. In Hebrew there is a play on words here: pearl and treasure share the same consonants. What is this treasure we need to honor and not expose to just any person or in any situation?
This treasure is one’s intimate relationship with God.
In Ps. 119: I lay your word as a treasure upon my heart. We lay God’s Word upon our heart, and in a sacred moment our hearts open, this word sinks into the heart, and transforms it.
This pearl that Jesus is talking about is like the metaphor of a seed as in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. It needs the dark and the depth of the soil in order to germinate and become the mature plant that it is meant to become. The seeds that fall on the road, the rock, and the thorns all are trampled on, or wither.
The gift of God’s grace is a treasure to be honed and honored in solitude and silence.
3. The third imperative: Jesus urges us to ask, seek and knock and trust that the door of grace will be opened to us. When we don’t know how to deal with a situation, we tend to contract and go into the insular within ourselves. This makes us less available to grace. We must find a balance between self-effort and trust, openness and reliance on the grace of God.
Jesus throughout the Gospel teaches us to think of grace, God’s presence as woven into the fabric of reality. There is the reality of the daily 24/7, and there is grace, which is wider and deeper than our limited sense of self.
When we rely on ourselves to figure out how to deal with any particular problem in our lives, this leads to hopelessness and even despair. On the other hand when we leave everything up to the grace of God, then we shirk responsibility and we can go to sleep, become passive, numb.
This is a paradox: we need to question, seek understanding, but sooner or later we come to a dead end, a humbling sense of fallibility, perhaps even failure. We need to look inward, feel our desires, and engage in the struggle in dealing with them. But we also need to experience that we cannot with our small minds solve any dilemma. Sometimes we may even cry out: “Oh God, where are you in this mess?” We feel alone and empty. Then out of the blue, the grace of God breaks through. Grace, beauty and a quality of love permeates us. There is a moment of aliveness resonating within us. Chronos time merges with Kairos time as Br. Luke in his homily mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
St. Teresa of Avila says that in any given difficult situation, we need to engage all our faculties as though everything depends on us and yet we need to surrender and trust as though everything depends on God.
I like to offer a true story: Fr. William Johnson SJ taught world religions at the University of Tokyo for many years. He also started there a daily meditation group. All were welcome, Christians or not. One day a young man came in, introduced himself to Fr. Johnson asking if he could come. He said he was very depressed, that life was a daily struggle, his girlfriend had left him, he hated his job etc. and really he had no desire to live. Coming here was the last attempt to do something about his miserable life. He asked Fr. what he should do during this silent time: Fr. Johnson said: recite this phrase: “Today is a beautiful day”. It doesn’t matter if you do not believe it, nor feel it; just do it. This young man came every day. Weeks later the man comes up to Father Johnson saying: “thank you”. My external situation is the same yet “truly today is a beautiful day”. This man’s ‘small mind has descended into his heart. Nothing changed but everything has changed.
