The Christian Cannot Be Camouflaged
5th Sunday of the Year
From last week until the beginning of Lent, our Sunday Gospels are taken from the Sermon on the Mount, chapters five through seven of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. We heard last Sunday Jesus open the Sermon with the Beatitudes; and over the next two Sundays, we will hear Christ teach how the old law is fulfilled, not abolished, by the new law he gives.
Today’s passage—verses 13 through 16 of chapter five—serves the whole sermon in an important way. Christ’s words seem to speak directly to a fundamental issue currently facing the Church, a tendency in which, basically, the Church acts like a chameleon: assuming a posture of self-preservation in which Christians make themselves virtually indistinguishable from the world around them.
Before looking at what Christ teaches us today, let’s look around it. In the Beatitudes of last week, Christ delineated eight ways in which ordinary human experience can become blessed. This blessedness is not a natural, necessary outcome, such that anyone who inhabits these conditions is simply guaranteed to be happy. Rather, the poor in the spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted are called blessed only insofar as they, in their state, are united to Christ, who freely assumed those same states for himself. Beatitude is simply the fruit of allying our experience with Christ, who allies himself with us.
In the following two weeks, and in the remainder of the Sermon which we won’t hear at Mass, Jesus will teach that it is better to reconcile than to brood in anger, that infidelity is matter of the heart not only the body, that divorce is not part of God’s plan, that oaths should be kept, that retaliation should be avoided, that our enemies should be loved, that almsgiving, prayer, and fasts should be done in secret, that heavenly treasures should be preferred to earthly, that we cannot serve two masters, that we should not be anxious, judge one another, or give what is holy to dogs, that we should ask, seek and knock, and strive to enter the narrow gate, that we should avoid false prophets, be on guard against self-deception, and, finally, heed the words Jesus has spoken, lest the rain, the floods, and the wind blow us over and wash us away.
In the midst of this Sermon, we find the four verses appointed for this Sunday. They contain an implicit, double admonition: do not lose your flavor; do not conceal your light. With what is Jesus concerned? I’d wager that, in the middle of this extended discourse on the contours of the Christian life, Jesus is aware that his proposal runs dangerously close to natural virtue—by which I mean the kind of good living of which any person of good will is capable of attaining. What Jesus teaches, basically, can be boiled down to qualities any person, regardless of their faith, should have: integrity, sincerity, trust, a mild temper, and so on.
But if the life to which Christ calls his disciples does not retain its distinction from that which anyone else can live—if Christian virtue becomes indistinguishable from natural virtue—then the Christian is no longer the salt of the earth, but just the earth, no longer the light of the world, but just the world. The Sermon on the Mount would, then, become indistinguishable from Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Ethics, and Christ himself would simply be a moral guide like any other; and our choice to follow him the choice of one from among equals. If Christ is relativized, then Christ himself is lost and our discipleship proves an unnecessary burden, which can and should be thrown out and trampled underfoot, for it is no longer good for anything.
Do not lose your flavor; do not conceal your light. The Christian is supposed to be conspicuous, not camouflaged, among their surroundings. Do not become stale and invisible; be bold and shine bright. The Christian does not exist to tell the world it’s doing a good job, but to call it higher. Christ’s teachings do, in fact, come close to natural virtues, but only to then push off from them to heights far beyond. Whenever an act done in the name of Christ could be mistaken for one done by any other religious group, political party, social club, or non-profit organization, then the Sermon Christ preached on the mountain has yet to be lived in his Church. Those people may do legitimate good. We may be called to serve alongside them. But Christ makes clear today that the Sermon on the Mount is to so shape and color our engagement with the world that the world will recognize in us that which it does not have: a depth and breadth of charity that far surpasses its own.
What Christ teaches on the Mount, he lived himself and continues to live within his saints. In their lives, we learn the true, exceeding measure of Christian charity. John of the Cross didn’t just bring bread to the poor on the streets of Spain, but the finest meals he could find. Damien of Molokai didn’t treat the lepers of Hawaii from a safe distance, concerned with his own health, but so closely he contracted the disease himself. Francis of Assisi took Jesus’ words literally to sell everything he had for the poor and leaped across the city streets in hardly a tunic. And beyond these and countless examples of their extraordinary charity, we learn also from them the daily, simple acts of love that mark true holiness. The saints, as different as they were, understood one thing in common: Christ alone was to be the form of their life. When the saints read the Sermon on the Mount, they did not congratulate themselves for the good life they had already lived but heard the Lord Jesus inviting them higher. Anyone who truly aspires to be a Christian must do the same.
There is something irresistibly attractive about the person who does. There is no better reason to be Christian than the saints who have done it themselves. And there is no hope that the people around us will become Christian if we do not reach toward that holiness for ourselves.
If, after however many homilies I’ve preached from this pulpit, I’m starting to sound like a broken record, it’s because this is my fundamental conviction about what the Church needs today: Christians who take the Christian life seriously. No exceptions. No compromises. No relativizing the Gospel to be like anything else. Only Christ, whole and entire, is the Gospel we must preach in word and deed.
I’m coming up on five years since I was ordained a deacon and started, liturgically, preaching the Gospel. When I was ordained, I had a card printed to remind people to pray for me. It included the exact verses from 1 Corinthians of today’s Second Reading. To this day, they are everything I believe about preaching done from the pulpit and the preaching done on the streets. Let’s listen, again, to Saint Paul, who calls us to soar above the world:
When I came among you, brothers and sisters, proclaiming the mystery of God, I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my message and proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of Spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God.
Amen.
Homily preached February 5, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen