A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, keep in mind what you've just heard from the first book of Kings, that delightful story about Jezebel and her husband. So now we have a bit from the New Testament, and these are the words of our lord. You have heard the commandment, Christ says. You shall love your countryman, but hate your enemy.
My command to you is love your enemies. Pray for your persecutors. This will prove that you are sons of your heavenly father, for his son rises on the bad as well as upon the good. He reigns on the just as well as upon the unjust. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that?
Do not tax collectors do as much? And if you greet your brothers only, what is so praiseworthy about that? Do not pagans do as much? In a word, you must be perfected as your heavenly father is perfect, And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. Well, this story from the first book of Kings today continues what we read yesterday. And I suppose some of you could scarcely tolerate the suspense. But it's a very simple matter where a man wants to get a piece of property that doesn't belong to him. So his wife, being smarter than he, has the owner murdered.
So then the king, gets the property. And as we're told today, he has now taken possession of this property, which he got from a man who was murdered in order that he might become the owner of this very precious bit of land, this vineyard. Now he has the vineyard. He's got he has what he wants. And I suppose he was very grateful to his wife for her fine inventiveness.
Now the big problem here is the retribution of God. You have to remember that this is from the book of kings. It's from the old testament. And if there's anything solid in the old testament from beginning practically to the end, is this conception that God's justice is perfected in this life. There is retribution that the doers of good get their reward in this life, because there is no other as far as the the Old Testament is concerned.
And those who do evil in god's sight, in other words, are violators of his law, they get their retribution retribution in the form of punishment. This theme has never been presented any better, more adequately, nor dramatically than in the book of Job because you have here apparently an innocent man being punished for crimes he didn't commit. How do you justify that in with the idea of god's justice? So when you see here how Ahab and his wife Jezebel manipulate through murder to get this coveted piece of land, you know there's going to be a a sequence. You know that this is not going to to go unpunished.
And so we are told in today's reading that God moves in and says, well, what you did to Naboth, the owner, who was taken outside of the city and stoned because he was falsely accused of treason and blasphemy, said now you're going to suffer the very same death. And you're not only going to be be suffer a cruel death, but even dogs are going to lick up your blood just as they did in Namath. So here you have an exact an illustration of god's justice. An evil deed has been done. A terrible murder has been committed.
The it god's law has been violated, and god moves in foursquare. But there's an aftermath. Just as we have the story of David and how he coveted his neighbor's wife and had her husband murdered and then took her as his own, and David got clobbered. But what happened? He went to the lord a penitent.
So in today's story, it ends, you see, with the king of Israel casting himself before the lord, admitting his crime, doing penance in sackcloth, fasting, torturing his body to try to show god that he is repentant. And the result is God listens to it. And but notice this. The punishment that was to come to him, God says, is going to be visited upon his children. Keep that in the back of your head.
Now today, in our in the last ten, fifteen years, we have heard so much that downgrades the justice of God, that downgrades the concept of law as being corroding of the higher human ideals. I remember, you still hear this great mosaic over in the National Shrine Of God. Many complained that it showed God in a very unsympathetic attitude as a very stern judge. It is not the picture of God to judge. But some people get that impression, and they think it's repulsive because we don't like to think of justice.
We are we are completely embroiled today. I said embroiled with love. Nobody knows what we mean by it, but we're embroiled with love. Everybody loves everybody. We mustn't have differences.
We must all be alike. You can't even use the word hate or the word ignorance. These are very ugly terms, and they're all absurd. How can you love something without hating its contrary? There's a place for if there's a place for love, then there's a place for hate.
And if there's justice, then there and if there is injustice, there's bound to be justice. You can't remember you only definition you have of a vice is through the positive virtue. Keep that in mind. There's no reality to vice. It's the negation.
It's the frustration of virtue. And so today we have lost this concept of the justice of God. We like to think of his love. Well, God is love. Of course, he is.
The story of David shows it. The story of that we have here. I don't know what happened to Jezebel, but what her husband repents. And God says, fine. But notice, justice will have its balance because the punishment will go according to this text to his errors.
So we have to hold all this all this together, and this is where life gets complicated. When we can say something is nothing but this, when we can say something is only this, then if we can come into grip if we can come to grips with the this, we've got our solve we've got our problem at least in hand. We got something here we can work with. If all I have to do is to be generous, then if that's all I have to do, my problem is relatively simple. But supposing now when I say you have to be generous and love your neighbor and be good to the poor, supposing I say yes, but I've got a $100 and I have five children to feed, how am I going to divide this up?
You see how see how life gets complicated? So that the the the more factors you put into a problem, the more complex the problem gets and the more difficult a solution. And this is frightfully true of life. Where we are such a complex being. If only we could understand this, that we are so complex that we have been called, and rightly so, a microcosm, a little world where where a human being has in it the entire universe from the basis the basics the most basic kind of matter all the way up to the most spiritual kind of reality.
We have been called to be the sons of God. How about that? We who are supposed to have been taken from the clay of the earth and a spirit breathed into us as we're told in Genesis. So a human being is frightfully complex. We can't even solve our problems on the basis of myself and God.
I've got to think of my neighbor. I'm a social being as well as an individual being. So the picture gets complicated. So there's no use of you can't talk about one virtue. You've the only kind the only virtuous life is a life that incorporates all the virtues, And this is the problem.
This is the problem. Remember in the days of the good old inner tube, you could have a magnificent inner tube, a beautiful inner tube. Just put one little pinhole in it, and what do you have? A flat tire. It's kaput.
And so it is with Cicero has a beautiful passage on this, and he was not exactly a follower of Jesus Christ. But he saw this clearly, that the pursuit of virtue is not the pursuit of one virtue. You've got to pursue the complexity of virtues. That love has to be involved with justice. Justice and love has to be involved with prudence.
Prudence, justice, love have to have perseverance. And so it goes. This is not a Christian concept. Any any sensible person knows this. But it's so simple to say life is nothing but one, nothing but this, and that we can do.
But when you've got to put all of this together, it's a problem. We have to be integrated. And what brings us integration? Jesus Christ. There it is in a nutshell.
If we follow him or try to follow him, we have got the problem solved. Not in actual living. We don't solve that until about twenty four hours after we're dead. But if we have Christ before us, with the way he lived and what he taught, not just taking a sentence here and a sentence there, but taking his good news as an entire message, not just what's in a book but what comes from his living tradition and his church, there we're safe. We have a guide, and we need a guide because when the blind leads the blind, they both fall into a ditch.
In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.