February 19, 2023 (Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Did Fr. Dominic pique your interest in the short films he preached about on Sunday? There are links in the text below, or find links here >>

“When I Get Grown”

by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.

[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]

This is crazy talk from Jesus. I mean he started this pipedream sermon on the mountain with “blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you.” Then he compared anger with killing. And now he’s telling us to love our enemies and to be perfect, to give ourselves over to more abuse by offering them the other cheek to hit?! I’m sorry, Jesus, but that’s just crazy talk. Besides, none of us here has any enemies, right? We don’t have any resentments against friends, family, or others.

I recently watched a short film from Stanford’s World House Project called When I Get Grown. It begins with a simultaneously charming, infuriating, and haunting animation. A black man from the south, Bernard Lafayette, narrates a life-changing incident from when he was seven and trying to ride the bus with his beloved grandmother. After the incident, he decides, “When I get grown, I’m going to do something about this.”

The rest of the short film has Lafayette narrating his experience as a grown but still young man in 1961, when he was one of the Freedom Riders taking buses through the south in a violently punishing and hugely successful mass nonviolent resistance campaign. You can watch When I Get Grown for free for the rest of Black History Month, and your weekly email will have a link to it. It’s a powerful story of the great price and transformative reward of loving one’s enemies.

In one of his sermons on loving our enemies, by Martin Luther King challenges us to begin by examining our own faults and our enemies’ virtues. Kind of upside down, right? He then reminds us that loving our enemies doesn’t mean liking them but not doing them harm and not working toward their defeat.

But why should we love our enemies, King asks? We love our enemies to arrest the downward spiral of violence in the word. We love our enemies because hate destroys us and makes us irrational so that we can’t see straight, we can’t see the truth. We love our enemies because love is redemptive, transforming individuals and society. In today’s gospel, Jesus says we love our enemies because God loves them: God “makes the sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”

But how do we love our enemies? Martin Luther King is especially concerned with expressing our love through mass nonviolent resistance. When I Get Grown is a fresh, compelling, and personal presentation of the power of mass nonviolent resistance based on love. We’re reminded of this technique’s thoroughly thought out philosophy, its rigorous training methods, and its creative expressions of nonviolent resistance, both planned and improvised. In the film, you’ll hear Bernard Lafayette tell how he creatively stood up to the abusive police, upended their expectations, and wrested control from them.

Jesus may not have had a fully-developed philosophy and technique for mass nonviolent resistance, but he sure gives some good examples of creative non-violent resistance. We often translate him as saying “offer no resistance,” but better is “don’t respond to violence with violence.” We don’t return abuse, but we also aren’t passive. In those days, if someone strikes you on the right cheek, as Jesus says, they have backhanded you to put you in your place. They won’t have used their left hand to punch you, because the left hand is for, well, you know… So when you then offer your left cheek, they can’t backhand you with their impure left hand. And punching you with their right hand would be a sign that you are their equal. Offering your opponent your other cheek isn’t about taking abuse but rather standing up to your opponent in a way that allows you to reclaim your dignity.

What about when your debt is called in – a debt incurred because of an unjust system that turns landowners into tenant farmers – and you’re asked to hand over your outer garment as payment? When you hand over your inner garment as well, you’re naked. In those days, and probably even in our time, this situation would bring shame to the other person rather than you. Walking the extra mile threatens to get the soldier in trouble for breaking the rule that he can only make you carry his bag for one-mile. Turning the table on your opponents in these situations is your way of reclaiming your dignity and taking charge, at least for the moment. Your opponent may be humiliated, but when you do these things in love, the goal isn’t their humiliation but their ultimate transformation. You get grown, and so do they.

I asked the staff the other day to reflect with me on some of the obstacles we’ve encountered to loving our enemies:

• Our desire to win or be better or not lose face; in a word, pride

• Our failure to acknowledge the power of previous wounds or our insecurities

• Our judgments and assumptions

• Our fear of opening ourselves to further abuse

• Our society’s or family’s norm of retaliation

• Our emotions getting the best of us when someone we love gets hurt

• Our failure to accept first that we are loved, to savor God’s love for us

How can we overcome these obstacles? I watched another eye-opening film recently. It’s called The Steel Shutter and is available free on YouTube. It was made fifty years ago by our recently deceased brother Pat Rice and his mentor Carl Rogers. They brought a group of Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics to the United States for a weekend to talk about their differences. About halfway through the film, in response to a question from Pat, the conversation suddenly drops to a deeper, truer level. One of the participants confesses that he has a steel shutter within himself that has walled him off from his true feelings of pain, anger, and hopelessness but that allows him to go about his daily business and function. Talk about an obstacle to real progress and growth. The rest of the film shows their courage in lifting their steel shutters a bit, seeing each other more clearly and seeing themselves. When our hearts get grown and healed, life begins.

Jesus removes obstacles to love with his central act of loving, nonviolent resistance, allowing himself to be killed for love. This isn’t a passive act on his part. We see especially in John’s gospel how much Jesus is presiding over his interrogation and execution. And in Luke, he says in the midst of his suffering, “Forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” Jesus’s cross, his loving us to death, is not only a model for us but also the source of our power.

Lent means spring, a time of growth. As we prepare to move into Lent, we might allow ourselves to get grown a bit more. Did you, like Bernard Lafayette, have an experience as a kid that made you want to do something about it? Have you suffered or witnessed in the world an incident of injustice that put fire in your belly? Have you put that fire behind a steel shutter? Is it time for you to let that fire, that anger, fuel love so that you can blossom with Easter?

How can we love our enemies during Lent? Is there one enemy you can creatively love in the coming weeks? Let’s have our own mass nonviolent resistance movement on campus and beyond, all based on a love that transforms our enemies and frees us. This Lent, let’s get grown by savoring God’s invincible love for us and daring to love our enemies. Pat Rice, pray for us. Martin Luther King, prayer for us. All those who have shown us the true meaning of turning the other cheek and helped us get grown, pray for us.