Homily for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Isn’t that what many parents have said to our children as they grew up?
Make Good Choices..
Our readings today … if fact, ALL of the readings at Mass today are centered around the theme of making wise, good choices. Sirach —- I love Sirach – it is the largest collection of ethical teachings from antiquity to have survived. Our reading today from Sirach is all about making choices.
Sirach says ….. to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. God has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.
Sirach reminds us that the choices we make are indeed ours to make. He reminds us that God does not force us to decide on anything in God’s way. We choose and decide on our own. We make the choice. And with that choice, we also choose the consequences of that choice.So how do we make good choices?
The Hebrew Scriptures share with us the learnings from thousands of years of the lived history of God’s Chosen people and how they discovered the answer to that question. And in the two thousand years since Jesus walked on the earth, our community, the Church, has reflected deeply on the same question and has offered some guidance.
Most of us know the advice of history and of the Catholic community – that our decisions must be INFORMED and WELL FORMED.
INFORMED means we have looked at all the data we need to get a handle on a situation before making a decision. Whether the issue is Climate Change or the new girlfriend or boyfriend of our teenage child….. need the data! WELL FORMED is a bit harder. It means that we have looked beyond ourselves to seek wise counsel.
Perhaps one of the best contemporary examples of this comes from our First Nations communities. Before a decision is made that will have significant impact on the lives of those in the community, they look back seven generations to seek the wisdom of the elders, and look ahead seven generations to see the impact on the children yet unborn . Then and only then is a decision made …… how very wise that is!
We teach our children about critical thinking and along with the schools we develop their skills in this area. And heaven knows that is what the business world expects of us. But while we may have focused on informing our decisions, I think we have not done as well in making well-formed decisions. Maybe we have become so independent in our thinking that we believe we don’t need to take counsel from others. That we are self-made women and men. And we don’t need counsel from anyone – particularly not the church telling us what to do. We ignore the wisdom of thousands of years at our own peril. As George Santayana said – those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The result of all this is a reminder to us to seek counsel in making tough decisions. In making well-formed decisions. And the church has valuable insights to offer. Seek its counsel. Also – don’t forget to ask the Wonder-Counselor ….. take your decision to prayer. But be open to receiving an answer that you do not prefer.
And that brings us to today’s Gospel. Where Jesus takes that decision making process and kicks it up a notch. Because he calls us to look deeper within ourselves as we form those decisions. You see, as humans we have an infinite capacity for self-deception. We can convince ourselves of almost anything. So consciously or unconsciously we filter the data we use to inform ourselves, and filter the counsel that we seek to make well formed decisions.
So, Jesus calls us to look beyond the surface to become aware of the root causes of our behaviours. The attitudes around which those filters are built. He reminds us that the actions of injuring the other, of which murder is the extreme example, begin with the anger in our heart. And violence to another begins because we have not dealt with the violence in our own hearts. Jesus used the example of adultery and identifies that the problem begins with perception: with a man’s fundamental attitude towards a woman. Is she an object for sexual exploitation? Or is she a fellow human being with whom dealings in any area must be based upon equality of relationship, fidelity and consent?
Jesus reminds us that our life as humans is essentially relational: it flourishes where respect, faithfulness, and consideration of the other prevail. He reminds us that our exterior actions, our behaviours, reflect our interior attitudes.
Jesus challenges you and I to clean up our act on the inside so that our external actions are not hypocritical but a true reflection of who we are. This is what Jesus means when he says, “let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.” He calls us to have the integrity to be able to say ”My life is an open book. I have no secrets. What you see is what you get.”
We all need to be able to say that. We shouldn’t need to take oaths to prove our righteousness. It should be evident to others by the way we live our lives. And by the choices, the good choices, we make.