A Homily for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany

+ To hate evil is a virtue. St Paul places it in his list of marks of God’s grace in the epistle of this Holy Mass. The psalmist goes further: “I have hated them with a perfect hatred” he sings, and thus we sing, of those who hate God (Ps 138[9]:21-22). The perfect hatred, however, is not filled with an emotion and subjectivity, but rather a definite and concrete manner of dealing with such people in order that justice and charity can reign supreme. It is the only manner of either protecting society from the evils that threaten it or restoring the person who hates God to that charity in which he can flourish. That perfect hatred will thus never seek vengeance on the man, even if he must be stopped howsoever possible. Sin damages the one who commits it as the people around him.

Evil, nonetheless, is never far from our own person. Each and every sin is an evil act of greater or lesser extent. Yet how often we fall into sin, even just minor daily sin. The Apostle again says: “what I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15). It is precisely that evil, which he hates, which is the sin, the act, which he hates yet does that he herein speaks. This is the first evil which we all must strive to overcome with everything we have, the help of the sacraments and the ministers of the Church.

Whilst evil may ever be on our heels trying, by every means possible, to destroy all the good we can do, St Paul reminds us that grace is offered all the more strongly as sin pushes further (Romans 5:20)—not due to the sin, but as a gift in order that we might be fortified to overcome sin. Nevertheless, we must allow that grace to work in us and cooperate with that grace through whatever means are necessary.

In the epistle the apostle is, however, not placing the emphasis on the grace to overcome our sin, but on that which drives us to do good. Whilst hatred of evil is needed to overcome our sin, it does not suffice simply to do good to those around us. Each of the graces that God gives us is given for a purpose. He has a mission which he wants us to accomplish. His usual manner of governing men is to choose a leader who can communicate to them His will and encourage them to follow it. Such a leader must take up all the arms that are available to him in establishing the reign of God in the world through the Church.

Pope Leo spoke of this mission reflecting St Augustine’s work The City of God. He notes the difficulty that is imposed upon us by the fluidity and subjectivity that is infecting language such that the concepts that words “represent are increasingly ambiguous. … Moreover, in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents. We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally.” By undermining of the concept of reality, separating it from its anchor in the truth, he says, freedom of expression is losing its guarantee. “In an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, [modern language] ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.”

Reality is objective and our use of language must reflect that. We cannot reduce judgments to feelings, nor make our feelings governing principles. Rather a judgement must be made about a situation and how to deal with, or indeed, to interact with a person in the manner most apposite for the establishment of charity. A judgment is not dependent on the particular day on which it is made but the criteria which is presented to the person underlying the given occasion. By making sound judgments, moreover, we can well distinguish between good and evil and thereby aim for the one whilst rejecting the other absolutely. +