Robert Barron - Be a Saint
Peace be with you. Friends, we've had the privilege now of reading from the Sermon on the Mount, and we'll continue for the next couple of weeks. What an extraordinary experience it is, just to hear from Jesus himself as he lays out his basic teaching. What we find today is Jesus as the new Moses. So, like Moses, he goes up on a mountain and he receives and then gives a new law. And he does something extraordinary to me throughout the sermon, we hear it today: "You've heard it said..., but I say..."
Now we might let that just slip through our minds, but we shouldn't, because that would've taken their breath away in the first century. You've heard it said in the Torah, that's what he means, which was the highest possible authority for a Jew of that time, the law given to Moses. You might appeal to your rabbi, who was taught by another rabbi, by another all the way back to Moses. who received the Torah from God. And so, to say the Torah was to say the ultimate law. Therefore, when Jesus kind of blithely comments, "Well, you've heard it said there, but I say...," that's an affirmation of his divinity.
St. John will say it very explicitly, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh", but within this Matthean context, that's just as high a Christology, just as clear an affirmation of Jesus' divinity. "You've heard it said..., but I say..." Who alone could rightfully say that but the one who is himself the author of the Torah? So with full authority as the new Moses, Jesus gives the law. And notice please, he's not an anti-Moses. There's a kind of simplistic understanding of the relation between the Old and New Testaments that goes something like this: Well, Moses and the law and all that, hung up on rules and regulations, and then Jesus comes with this great, liberating word of grace, so grace versus law. That is completely alien to the Bible.
By the way, both Old Testament and New, as though there's no grace in the Old Testament? Come on. As though there's no law in the New? No. Listen to what he actually says: "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law". He's not abrogating the law. He's not negating the law. He's going to, listen now, intensify it. He's going to intensify the law of Moses, not get rid of it. And he wants that law, now intensified, to get all the way down inside of us.
Go back to Jeremiah 31: 31, the new covenant: "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and I will write my law on their hearts". See, that's a very important text for understanding Jesus. He himself is the Torah made flesh. He's the full intensity of the law. And now he wants that to enter into our flesh, to be written on our hearts. Okay. Now listen as he begins to delineate this. "You have heard it said", there it is, right, in the Torah, "You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you", there he is now, speaking with full divine authority, "But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment". Okay?
Is killing bad? Yes, obviously. Forbidden by the Ten Commandments? Yes, obviously. But Jesus now wants to go deeper. Of course this activity of taking someone's life is bad. But what's the root of it? Where's it come from? It comes from a hatred that dwells deep down inside of us. It comes from an anger that we have not resolved or dealt with. He wants the corrective power of the law to go beyond merely the behavioral level and to get down to the level of the heart. Where do our bad actions come from? That's what Jesus is interested in. He wants the law to go all the way down there. Then how about this? "You have heard it said", again, in the Torah, "you shall not commit adultery".
So again, that's a standard law of ancient Israel. "But I say to you", here's the new Moses speaking, "everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart". Same principle. Obviously sexual sin and adultery is the one he focuses on. They're bad, obviously, these bad behaviors. But where do they come from? They come from dysfunctional places deep down inside of us. To gaze at a woman with lust, what does that mean? That means that already in my interiority, I have objectified that woman. I've turned her into simply an object for my own pleasure. Extrapolate from this, everybody, and all these different forms of objectifying other people. Look at the rampant quality of pornography in our culture. What is that?
You say, "it's in the privacy of my home, or it's in my private life". Yeah, but in your heart, what you're doing is you're objectifying people for your own pleasure. Jesus wants the law to reach beyond the level of behavior into these recesses of the heart. I can't help but comment on this, how congruent the best of the sort of #MeToo movement is with this. The #MeToo movement, that's coming from Christianity. That's not a common view. If you look in the ethics and morality of different systems around the world, ancient and modern, you don't find that automatically, that you shouldn't objectify people. But the ground of it, everybody, is right here.
If you look upon a woman with lust in your heart, you've already committed adultery. I think that the best of what we find in people's ethical convictions today, we can trace back to these great texts. Now, where's all this finally coming from? I think if you want the interpretive key to the entire Sermon on the Mount, it's this: "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect". Jesus is not just interested in making us morally upright. I mean, that might sound like a lot, and I guess it is, but he wants to go much further than that. He wants us to be perfect as God is perfect. So you say, "Hey, look, my behavior, I'm not that bad of a guy. I'm not committing murder or committing adultery, or I'm not stealing things".
Yeah, but in the inner recesses of your heart, you're lusting after these things. You want to do them. Let's be honest, if there weren't police departments and there weren't people going to be gossiping and putting you on television, maybe you would do these things. So don't just say, "Oh, yeah, my behaviors are more or less under control". No, no. Unless the law has reached all the way deep down to your heart, you're not perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Here's a corollary, everybody: the Church is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. Let me say that again. The Church is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. "Hey, I'm doing okay. Hey, I'm not a murderer".
How often do you hear things like that? "Hey, I'm not a bad guy. I'm not committing murder". Yeah, that's where we're setting the bar? That if you're not committing murder you're a good guy? The Church isn't interested in that. Because the ordinary goal of the Christian life is to be a saint. Oh, come on. Isn't that too much? No, no. That's the ordinary goal of the Christian life. That's the purpose of every sacrament, is to draw us into the divine life in such a way that we can say with Paul, "It is no longer I who live; it is Christ who lives in me", in my behaviors, yes, and in my heart, in the interiority of my life. Christ has taken command of me.
Time and again, and you hear it today; as I record these words we're debating this again, in the life of the Church, there are always people that want to dial down the moral demand. Now, in my lifetime, this has changed over the centuries, but in my lifetime, usually around sexual ethics. Hey, isn't the Church being a little too demanding on us? If you go through the sexual teaching of the Church in all of its dimensions, isn't that kind of asking a little much of people? Can't the Church dial it down a little bit? Why are we dialing it down? We're not interested in spiritual mediocrity. No, no. The Church holds up these high moral ideals. Here's something I find interesting.
Move outside the sexual arena for a minute and look at another issue. Think of something like just war. The Church has got a very, very stringent teaching when it comes to warfare. It says seven criteria have to be met before a war is determined to have been entered justly, and then in the waging of that war, the great criteria of proportionality and discrimination have to be met. In other words, there's got to be a proportion between the goal to be achieved and the means that you're using, and you've got to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Now, I'm not going to go through all the seven criteria with you, but trust me when I tell you, if you apply all of these teachings, I can't think of one war that was ever utterly justly waged.
Oh, you know what the Church ought to do? It ought to dial down those ideals. Let's make it a little bit easier on combatants and on generals and on military personnel. Let's not put so many strictures on it. Who'd advocate for that? No, no. The Church holds up a high moral ideal that has to do with behavior, yes, and has to do even with the inner recesses of the heart. Because we're not fooling around. Because Jesus wasn't fooling around. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Let me close with this, everybody. I think a way to read the pontificates of John Paul II and Francis is along these lines. John Paul II, saint himself, a hero in the spiritual order. And his great virtue, I think, was he held up especially to young people this beautiful ideal, high, high, demanding, moral ideal. The language I've been using, I learned that from John Paul II, right? So I want you to be saints, great saints, not mediocrities. So he held it up high. What's the shadow side of that? I've seen it in my ministry, dealing with a lot of seminarians from the John Paul II generation. The shadow side is: What do I do when I fail? How do I feel when I can't quite live up to that high moral ideal? Well, here's the flip side of it now. Yes, we make a high moral demand, and we insist upon the infinity of the Divine Mercy.
Now, Pope Francis, what's the leitmotif? What's the great theme of his papacy? The Divine Mercy, that God is merciful love, that God reaches out to the sinner, to those who are bowed down, to those on the margins, to those who are wounded, comes to the field hospital. But now see, read John Paul II and Francis together and don't compromise either one. Don't say, "Oh, for the sake of Francis we should dial down John Paul's moral ideal," or vice versa. Don't do that. Rather, we take both of these popes, because the Church says we're extreme in our demand and we're extreme in the mercy that we offer. To get that right, to live in that space, is to live in the space opened up by the Sermon on the Mount. And God bless you.