for June 15
Monday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time

The common thread in today’s readings is evildoing, but the readings present different perspectives on the various ways evil affects our lives and relationships and how we might respond to it.

Jezebel in the first reading is one of those people we refer to nowadays as bad news. Her marriage to King Ahab was certainly bad news for Israel. Her machinations destroyed her in the end, but she caused a lot of damage to Israel’s faith, kingdom, and many of its people along the way. In literal terms, her stratagem to get Naboth wrongfully accused and killed because he turned down Ahab’s offer is clearly an evil. She abuses the power of the king, enlists others to lie, and gets an innocent man killed—the very actions the psalm enumerates as evil. There is also a symbolic level. Naboth refuses to sell his vineyard because it is his ancestral heritage. The Jewish covenant with God is an ancestral heritage for the nation and a vineyard is a standard image for Israel. Jezebel, who is not Jewish, is trying to replace worship of Yahweh with worship of Baal. Last week we saw Elijah engage in a contest with the priests of Baal—so the deceitful appropriation of Naboth’s vineyard can be seen as a metaphor for the attempt to subvert Israel’s covenant with God.

The psalm, by contrast, is a personal cry to God for justice. The psalmist is in distress and pleads with God to come to his aid. He has faith that God will hear him because God loves goodness and truth rather than wickedness. Just as importantly, he lets God hear his anguish. We too can bring our feelings to God—our pain and sorrows, our fears and anger, as well as our joys and delights. To be in relationship with God is to be able to share with him what is in our hearts, to talk to him and perhaps to hear him reply. God always meets us where we are. If we pretend to be somewhere else, we’ll find it difficult to connect with him.

In the Gospel passage, Jesus appears to be teaching a very different, if not opposite, approach to evil. On the face of it, he seems to be advocating enabling the evildoer. But his words, a continuation of the Sermon on the Mount, have to be seen in the context of the law of love Jesus is laying out. His intent is to stop the cycle of violence with love. Perpetrating harm on someone dehumanizes them by making them into an object rather than a person in relationship with you. To fight back when attacked doubles down on the objectification. Jesus counsels his disciples to subvert this objectification by doubling down on the love instead. Of course, one has to love as Jesus did to do this fully. We have to be honest about our limitations and recognize the extent to which we are capable of loving in this way. At the least, we can strive to forgive those who hurt us rather than retaliate against them, to maintain a sense of their personhood rather than objectify them with dehumanizing labels, and to pray for them rather than curse them.
—Christine Szczepanowski

The readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.