The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5:44-45

In today’s gospel (Matthew 5:38-48) Jesus drives the lesson of compassion home so clearly and so explicitly that it must have knocked his listeners off their feet. He pointed out that the source of compassion was not in human laws or in the courts. In Israel at that time, the law said that a debtor could be forced to give up his cloak and tunic, which pretty much depleted the wardrobe of the poor. Jesus said: “if anyone wants to go to law over your shirt, hand him you coat as well”. What Jesus was doing was extending compassion beyond the strict justice of the law because compassion must reach beyond resentment and vengeance; it must imitate the compassion of our creator who “makes His sun to shine on bad and good people alike.”

The lessons in today’s gospel are hard lessons to come by: “when a person strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other.” And again, “should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him two miles.” It was a hard duty for the Israelites to accept being pressed into service by the occupying forces of Rome, which had the power to make them carry arms or supplies a mile.

Jesus said, “Go two miles.”

No doubt, we would rather be given a set of rules to follow, demands to fulfill, than to be stretched like this. When the demands of the law are met we think that justice is done, and we can wash our hands and go about our own business. But, can we? Compassion knows no vacation like this for it is an attitude of the heart. It doesn’t discriminate against the unworthy or undeserving or pick and choose between family and stranger.

Compassion is for everyone, for “the just and the unjust”, for pagans and believers alike. Compassion, Jesus tells us, is to be given as indiscriminately as rain from the heavens that falls on “the just and unjust” or as the gentle sun that rises on “the bad and the good”

Christ like compassion is the special occupation of the Christian. It is, as I said before in another blog on October 25, the energy of love.

Learn to be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate.

Fr. Hugh Duffy