Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

          “Hypocrite.”  We wince at this word, and for good reason.  It is not a likeable word; it is not a likeable thing.  While Jesus doesn’t use this specific word in the Gospel passage from Matthew today, He does use it in other places, and He is certainly pointing to the concept of hypocrisy in this passage.  “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses” – in other words, Jesus respectfully recognizes their office.  “Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you” – Jesus even endorses their message, insofar as they are calling God’s people to faithfulness to the covenant God established with their ancestors.  “But do not follow their example” – Ah!  Here it is.  Without having to say the word, Jesus tells us that there are some in this world who say one thing and do another, and that we should not follow their example.  They are hypocrites.  “They preach but they do not practice.  They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.”

“You tell ‘em, Jesus!  Who do they think they are?  Those lousy, good for nothing hypocrites!”  But wait a second…what if that’s me, at least some of the time?  If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s probably not hard to find at least a few areas of our lives in which our words and ideals and our behavior do not always align, where we say we believe one thing, but then struggle to live that out.  I can tell you that as a priest, as someone who is looked to as having at least some moral authority, this is a daily reality.  People, think I’m holy just because I’m priest.  In reality, I am “working out my salvation with fear and trembling” (cf. Philippians 2:12) through my calling to the priesthood.  To adapt a line from Saint Augustine, “For you I am a [priest], but with you I am a Christian.”  In other words, I’m in the same “soup” as all of you, striving to live out the Christian life more perfectly every day.  I’m guessing that others know this feeling well: parents, university administrators, professors, coaches, mentors, employers, campus ministers, student leaders, our bishop and even our pope.

So, we have to be honest about the fact that there is this daily struggle to be the people we say we are, to really live the Gospel we profess.  I have always taken great comfort in Saint Paul’s words at the end of the seventh chapter of the letter to the Romans.  He says, “The willing is ready at hand, but the doing is not.  For I do not do the good I want, I do the evil I do not want…I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.  For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind.”  It gives me comfort that the greatest evangelizer the Church has ever know, shared in this very struggle.  And how did Saint Paul ultimately resolve this?  What was his secret?  How did He figure it out?  Well, in a way, he didn’t.  Rather, he recognized that he could not resolve this tension within himself by himself, by his own cleverness or goodness.  Instead, he abandoned himself completely to the grace and mercy of God.  And so, at the end of this passage from Romans, just when you think that Saint Paul has “thrown in the towel” in despair, he says, “Who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  In other words, Saint Paul realizes that it is God, and God alone, who can resolve this conflict within himself, through Jesus Christ, who is God and yet became one of us, and who knows our struggles.  Saint Paul “turns the corner,” so to speak, and the next verses, at the beginning of chapter eight, are much more positive in tone, as he says, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For the law of the spirit of life…has set you free from the law of sin and death.”   And so, let’s make this turn with Saint Paul, from hypocrisy to its opposite: integrity.

Here, again, we can look to Saint Paul, but this time in his first letter to the Thessalonians, our second reading for today.  He says, “Brothers and sisters: we were gentle among you…with such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our very selves as well.”  Do you hear what’s going on here?  It’s not enough that Saint Paul and his companions preached the Gospel to these people, but that they also gave good example.  They shared, as he says, their “very selves as well.”  When the Gospel has been more and more incorporated and integrated in one’s life, then it can be preached even without words, and sometimes even more effectively without words.  The point is, there is a correspondence between Paul’s preaching and his living, such that he gives not only the message, but his very self.  If hypocrisy is this sheering off of the message from the person (“Do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example”), then integrity is the union or harmony between person and message.

I would offer the example of our own Holy Father, Pope Francis.  Very quickly after his election in 2013, he endeared himself to the whole world by his personal integrity and humility.  Which is not to say that his predecessors weren’t also men of integrity and humility; I believe they were.  But there was something more visible about Pope Francis’ witness to this, from going personally to go pay his hotel bill the day after the conclave, to his desire to simplify his clothing, his transportation, and his personal living arrangements.  In the first interview he gave after his election, when was asked who he was, Pope Francis answered in these words:  “I am a sinner.”  The two-hundred and sixty-fifth successor to the Apostle Peter and the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics chose to introduce himself to the world by acknowledging his own very personal struggle to be more perfectly the person that God is calling him to be.  That is integrity in my book.

There are many more examples of integrity, both within and outside the Church, both in the present and in the past, but topping them all, of course, is Jesus Himself.  Jesus represents…Jesus is in Himself that perfect correspondence between person and message, between word and action.  He but says the word and the blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the leper is cleansed, and the paralytic walks.  He but says the word and bread and wine become His body and blood, broken and poured out for us.  He loved and continues to love us not only by words but in the gift of His very self.

Now, to bring all of this back home a bit, to our own experience, we can say that no small part of the mission of this university is to form women and men of this kind of integrity, who give witness to our Gospel values (whether Catholic or not) not only by their words, but by their lives.  Our mission statement, says that we exist to enable our students “to develop intellectually, spiritually, ethically, socially, artistically and physically.”  We seek, in other words, the formation of the whole person.  And hopefully, more often than not, our students are the same people in the classroom as they are on the field, as they are on the court, as they are on the stage, as they are on a Friday night with friends, as they are on Sunday morning at church.  As Christians, we simply cannot afford to live “compartmentalized” lives.  To do so would is not only to our personal detriment, but to the detriment of our mission.

Do any of us achieve this kind of integrity of life perfectly?  With rare exception, probably not, at least not this side of heaven.  But in all humility we acknowledge our failings and embrace again our goals, confident that by the grace and mercy of God, this is possible.