Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

The other night my cousin was telling me about a book he’s currently reading called “The Year of Living Biblically.” It’s written by A.J. Jacobs, a journalist in New York, who is ethnically Jewish but grew up in an entirely secular home. He decided that in order to understand the world, and the fact that religion isn’t disappearing into post-Enlightenment rationalism as many had predicted, he was going to try to live the Bible as literally as possible for a whole year.

Now, living the Ten Commandments is one thing – even considering the very strict interpretation Jacobs gives to Commandments such as keeping the Sabbath day holy. But Jacobs goes beyond even that, striving to follow all the Old Testament’s seemingly innumerable rules about ritual purity, dress, grooming, ritual sacrifices, and food.

This probably seems completely crazy to most of us – not only because we’re well-catechized Catholics and we realize that Catholics are not Biblical fundamentalists, but also because it seems so absolutely impossible to follow each and every miniscule command of the Law in modern, twenty-first century America.

Frankly, many of us might have a very similar reaction to today’s Gospel from St. Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. In it, we hear Jesus say quite explicitly that He “has not come to abolish the Law,” and that “not the smallest letter, or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the Law.”

Indeed, in the lines that follow Jesus goes on to examine six specific laws – and the commands that Jesus gives not only include the entirety of what the law required, they go beyond and surpass what was commanded by the law.

For example, the first law that Jesus discusses is “You shall not kill.” Jesus goes even further to state: “whoever is angry will be liable to judgment.”

Of course, we recognize that anger is a disposition that can lead to murder. So we see that Jesus is not doing away with the law against murder, He is rather forbidding even the disposition, the state of mind that might lead to such a terrible act.

This is what Jesus means when He says elsewhere in the Gospels that our righteousness must surpass that of the Pharisees and scribes: Jesus is requiring that we go beyond fulfilling the letter of the law and also fulfill the deeper, even more demanding spirit of the law.

What Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount is so demanding that many of us are left to wonder if we can seriously expect to live this way – or is this really a fool’s bargain, like A.J. Jacobs attempting to follow every miniscule Biblical rule in the midst of modern Manhattan.

Into that uncertainty, our first reading from the Book of Sirach, speaks a measure of hope. The very first line of the reading states simply but powerfully: “If you choose, you can keep the commandments.”

Of course, Sirach is speaking about the commandments of the Old Testament. But clearly the Church pairs this reading with today’s gospel from St. Matthew in order to teach us that doing what Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount is indeed possible for us.

Yes – Jesus calls His followers to live lives of heroic virtue. Yes – following Jesus means trying to live in a way that often seems impossible – even crazy. But it can indeed be done – even in our modern, sophisticated, and technological lives.

In our second reading, St. Paul says in his Letter to the Corinthians: “we speak a wisdom to those who are mature, not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away – rather, we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory.”

The wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount is not the wisdom of this world. The wisdom of the Beatitudes that we heard two weeks ago, and the wisdom of the commandments we have heard today is certainly not conventional wisdom. But it is God’s wisdom – mysterious and hidden – and more powerful than human wisdom; and as St. Paul says, it is ordered from the beginning, not for our torment, not to be impossible, but to be the source of our glory.

Brothers and sisters, the saints – perhaps especially the many saints and blesseds of our own age, raised to the altars by Pope John Paul II – show us not only that the commandments can in fact be fulfilled – they also show us the glory that is to be obtained by following them. Their lives are our model in every age, and their prayerful intercession is the supernatural assistance we know that we will need to do even that which seems impossible . . . because nothing is impossible with God.