6 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 5:17-37

Two years ago, the film ‘2012’ was released. It is a fiction, set in the near future, about cataclysmic end-of-the-world events. Around the time of the film’s release it kicked off a worldwide fascination with the Mayan people, who are said to have predicted the end of the world in December 2012.

Our fascination with the end of the world is endless. Films and books, gurus and religious fanatics of many creeds and persuasions have attempted to convince us of the impending doom that is coming upon us. The ‘end of the world’ is a very profitable industry.

Anybody here who has lost somebody precious to them knows what the end of the world feels like. When a loved one dies, or when a marriage breaks down, or when we ourselves experience a form of nervous breakdown – everything changes. Our world ends. Everything that was important: our job, house, car, salary – it all loses its value in the face of what has just happened to us. In one way we are lost. But, in another way we are found, because in that moment of loss we encounter reality in its purest form. I don’t mean that we have to be sad to be real. What I do mean is that the priorities we have in life – success and status, honour and prestige, lose all their value in the face of loss.

It is the same when we encounter God. We know that we have encountered truth when all of the priorities of our life get turned upside down. When success and status lose their power over us, we know that we have encountered the holy in some way.

It is much like this when a priest hears the call of God in his heart for the first time, calling him to give up everything: success, land, money, wife, for the sake of God’s Kingdom – as the song goes: ‘nothing else matters’.

It is like this when a young couple fall in love for the first time: ‘nothing else matters’.

In a way, we need a ‘nothing else matters’ approach to hear today’s gospel in the way that it was intended. We need to be able to hear it from the point of view of having encountered God. And, when you think about it, if you or I had encountered God, would anything else matter?

This brings us to a subtlety of the spiritual life: and that is our ability to forget the most beautiful encounters we have had with God. It is the same thing that allows us to move on from a painful experience of loss. We gradually forget the pain of loss – and we gradually forget the beautiful spiritual consolations that we have been given.

For the pain of loss, the therapists and counsellors recommend to us to remember the painful experience in order to be genuinely healed. For the beauty of the encounters we have had with the divine, the spiritual directors and accompaniers exhort us to keep a journal, so that we will be able to remember, and give thanks.

Our gospel today appears to be hard-hitting and uncompromising. It appears to make no sense in our time and place. We forget that it did not make sense in Jesus’ time and place either!

This Sunday’s gospel calls us to a deeper reality than the everyday aims and goals of our daily living. It reminds us of the real priorities of life that we encounter in the fleeting moments of love or of loss, of the call of God and the way of truth.