Many countries in Latin America have gone through revolutions or civil wars or military dictatorships, with a lot of killings and murders and violence taking place. Nicaragua, a country in Central America, is one such place. A man named Tomas Borge was a leader in the struggle against the dictatorship in control of his country. He was captured and put into prison. He was subject to the worse type of torture for months. It seemed like it would never end. After the dictatorship was toppled, Borge was freed and actually became the Minister of the Interior of the new government. One day, the tables were turned. The guard who inflicted such terrible punishment on him was now an inmate in prison himself. Borge visited this man in prison. He walked up to the man and said: “I am going to get my revenge from you”. He then held out his hand and said, “This is my revenge, I forgive you.”
For the last couple of weeks, we have heard passages from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. With images telling us that we are to be a light in the world and the salt of the earth, and with a perspective on God’s laws and commandments beyond their literal meaning, Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount push us to grow in our faith. Let’s think about the Pharisees. Jesus could be really tough on them, couldn’t he? The Pharisees desired to live in the light of God’s justice, to be just before God. They definitely had good intentions. And isn’t this the desire of all of us as disciples of Christ? But the Pharisees tried a very specific approach: to attain justice through the strict observance of God’s laws and commandments. The Pharisees thought that through their own effort they could succeed in being where God wanted them to be. Jesus understands where the Pharisees are coming from, but instead of validating them and their efforts, he announces a different kind of justice which exceeds and surpasses the justice of the Pharisees. We may think that taking an eye for an eye is justice. We may think that getting revenge is justice. Instead, Jesus challenges us to a higher standard: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” When most of us think of justice from our own point of view, centering justice on God and his law may be a very different point of view. Yes, we are to try to be perfect, to be like God, to fulfill God’s purpose in creating us, to cooperate with God’s grace in our lives. We become perfect when we try to love as God loves, to forgive as God forgives, to show unconditional good will and universal benevolence as God does.
What are some suggestions we can employ on our journey of faith that can help us live in the spirit of today’s Gospel? I thought about what it means to be holy, to aspire to be like God. We can begin by approaching holiness as as state of being, rather than just being able to follow God’s law and commandments in our lives. Yes, holiness is fundamentally not about doing, but about being. We are to live consciously in a state of prayer, a state of union with God, to live consciously inside of God. Holiness does not signify being perfectly pious, but doing and living for God’s sake what you used to do and live for our own sake. We are called to live as a different kind of human being, one whose center is outside ourselves and inside our unification with God. Yes, we are only truly free to live as disciples of Christ when we are free from ourselves. Holiness is not just about morality, but more about transforming ourselves and the center of our lives. When we are able to do this, then we can truly understand the point of today’s Gospel.
When Thomas Aquinas was celebrating mass during the feast of St Nicholas in the year 1273, he had a revelation, an experience with God that completely changed his life. Aquinas was not yet 50 years old and was considered one of the greatest theological minds the world had ever seen. He had written more than 100 works: commentaries on Scripture and on the Church Fathers, philosophical treaties, commentaries on Aristotle, explorations of disputed subjects, and his great work, the Summa Theologiae, which stood unfinished. Yet, after mass, he revealed to his secretary that his writings will now come to an end. Compared to the mystical experience he had with God during the celebration of the mass, he considered all his writings nothing more than straw. The intellectual aspect of our faith, God’s laws and commandments - they are all important, but they are not everything. If we do not have an authentic relationship with God, if our spirit and soul do not experience him and love him, than the rest is for nothing. As Aquinas experienced, words sometimes fail miserably to describe that transcendent, loving, mystical experience we have in our Lord.
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