The noted
scholar NT Wright tells us that “the kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was
all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity. Think of the best thing
you can do for the worst person and go ahead and do it. Think of the people whom
you are tempted to be nasty to, and lavish generosity on them instead.” He points out: “Jesus’ instructions have a
fresh, spring-like quality. They are all about new life bursting out
energetically like flowers growing through concrete and startling everyone with
their color and vigor.”
“Jesus’ point was not to provide his followers
with a new rule-book, a list of dos and don’ts that you could tick off one by
one and sit back satisfied at the end of a successful moral day. The point was
to inculcate, and illustrate, an attitude of heart, a lightness of spirit in
the face of all that the world can throw at you. And at the center of it is the
thing that motivates and gives color to the whole: you are to be like this because
that’s what God is like. God is generous to all people, generous to a fault: he provides good things for all to enjoy, the
undeserving as well as the deserving. He is astonishingly merciful; how can we,
his forgiven children, be any less? Only when people discover that this is the
sort of God they are dealing with will they have any chance of making this way
of life their own.”
“Do good
to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat
you . . . Love your enemies and do good to them . . . Be merciful, stop
judging, stop condemning, and forgive.” These commandments are all about what
God is like. Unfortunately, many of us have “fixated on a gloomy God, a
penny-pinching God, a God whose only concern is to make life difficult and
salvation nearly impossible.” But the God Jesus reveals is radically different:
completely averse to violence and vengeance, to the punishing justice that we
exact from one another. NT Wright suggests: “If we truly encountered him, no
doubt many of us would only stare!”
People did stare when Jesus lived the big-heartedness and
open-handedness he preached. As Wright puts it: “The reason why crowds gathered…was
that power was flowing out of Jesus and people were being healed. His whole
life was one of exuberant generosity, giving all he had to everyone who needed
it. He was speaking from what he knew: the extravagant love of his Father, and
the call to live a lavish human life in response. And finally, when they struck
him on the cheek and ripped the coat and shirt off his back, he went on loving
and forgiving, as Luke will tell us later. He didn’t show love only to his
friends, but to his enemies, weeping over the city that had rejected his plea
for peace. He was the true embodiment of
the God of whom he spoke.”
Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpts from a homily by Father Dominic.