Bishop Peter Muhich
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 12, 2023

So blessed once again to be together in this celebration of Mass televised throughout our diocese to those who either have a hard time or cannot come to church or who just want to take in an extra Mass broadcast on television. You’re in our hearts and prayers. You’re certainly in my prayers.

Jesus says in the Gospel today, “I tell you unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I am a neat person. I don’t mean engaging and interesting although I hope that’s at least partially true. No, what I mean is that I like things neat and clean and orderly. For example, I never leave my house in the morning without making my bed. I don’t think I’ve ever not made my bed since I was a kid. And when I was growing up in our large family and I shared a room with my brother, you could definitely see what side of the room was mine. Everything was in order and of course, the bed was made. 

Now, since cleanliness is next to godliness, I will claim this is a virtue. But there is a shadow side to it as well. I can get caught up too much in the external order of things and not pay enough attention to the deeper things of life. You can keep yourself busy straightening things for a long time. Maybe you should go to prayer more often and spend some time there as well. It is in fact a more important priority.

This Sunday, we continue to hear Jesus give his great Sermon on the Mount. The most famous sermon in human history. Two weeks ago, the Lord began with the beatitudes, and last week he continued with his teaching about us being the salt of the earth in the light of the world. 

Today, the Lord calls us to a radical way of life. Radical coming from the Latin radix which means root. A radical way of life. To live our faith from the roots up saying that our holiness must go beyond that of the scribes and the pharisees. Which begs the question, who are the scribes and pharisees? Well, they were experts in the Jewish law. They were lay people. They weren’t priests in the temple, but they were very much a religious community. They were very pious in their Jewish faith, and they observed, in addition to the 10 commandments, 613 other regulations, that in their minds was like building a fence around the Torah, the 10 commandments, to protect it and to help them live a devout life. Well, 613 rules were about washing their hands before meals, cleansing their beds, saying certain prayers, carrying out other rituals. They were the most outwardly, holy people in Israel. The common people looked up to them because they had to look of holiness.

Of course, we know in the Gospel the Lord is critical of them. Why? Now, Jesus knew that many of them were sincere in what they were doing but many of them were deceiving themselves and others. Their attention was too fixed on the outward things of the faith, the outside of religious observance and they were ignoring and losing sight of the purpose of God’s commandments, which is to help us to undergo an inner transformation not just an outward observance. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord is giving us the new law of the kingdom of God. In Matthew’s Gospel, he is very much the new Moses on the mountainside giving the law just like the Ten Commandments came to Moses on Mount Sinai and he gave them to the people. But this new law, the kingdom of God isn’t new in the sense of putting the old law aside. The Lord himself says, I have come not to abolishable but to fulfill the law. No, this is new law in the sense of fulfilling what God has said through Moses, explaining it, and getting to it to root. 

We hear three examples Jesus uses in the Gospel this Sunday. He said, you’ve heard it said you shall not kill but what I say to you is even if you are angry with your brother in your heart, you have violated this commandment. In other words, we do not merely kill with our arms, but we can kill their hearts. Violence starts inside of us before it emerges in some outward act. The Lord wants again his interior transformation.

He goes on to say, you’ve heard it said you shall not commit adultery, but I say a man who looks at a woman with less than his heart has already done that. We’re not just able to be unfaithful with our bodies, we can be unfaithful with our souls.

And then he says thirdly, do not take a false oath. He said don’t even do that. Don’t swear at all but say what you mean. Truth comes from our heart, and we should speak it and put it on to our lips.

Our now increasingly the secular culture is very much distracted by external things. It’s busy about a lot of things but not the deep things of life and so it doesn’t help us to develop our interior life. The good news is that the Lord Jesus is with us today, right now, in this celebration of the Eucharist with his most powerful presence. So powerful is this presence during Mass when we celebrate the Eucharist and receive him in holy Communion that we call it his real presence and that isn’t meant to denigrate the other ways he’s present to us in the Scriptures, and the poor, in moments of prayer. But it is to highlight how intense this presence is. He’s with us body, blood, soul, and divinity. We can’t get closer to the Lord on earth then we do when we’re with him in the Eucharist.

So, he who has conquered sin and death by his perfect sacrifice on the cross and his glorious resurrection is right here, and he has power to transform us from the inside out. As we celebrate this Mass and you say your Amens at home, I invite you to open your hearts to him now and ask him to make you not just outwardly holy but truly holy, transformed from the inside out.