In today’s Gospel Our Lord invites us to strive for perfection in our love. The rain is a good for everyone who receives its benefits, regardless of whether they “deserve” it or not. What if the rain stopped being good? If it became acid rain, it would no longer would be good. Through our charity or lack of charity we can go from rain to acid rain and must persevere in charity even when it feels that we’re getting burned.
The Lord acts in today’s First Reading in regard to King Ahab and his corrupt wife because if the king is not just, there can be no justice in his realm: the “rain” that was meant to benefit everyone in the kingdom and became “acid rain”: a good became evil and had to be stopped. King Ahab eliminated Naboth’s entire bloodline unjustly for the sake of one piece of property. In justice King Ahab’s bloodline must be eliminated for becoming worse than one of the peoples, the Amorites, who occupied the Promised Land before the Israelite’s occupied it. Just as the Amorites were cast out, so Ahab’s bloodline must be cast out.
If we suffer injustice, the Lord will make justice prevail, sooner or later. Let’s have faith in the Lord’s justice and not let the evil of others turn us from being a source of good to a source of iniquity. Charity always prevails in the long run.
Readings: 1 Kings 21:17–29; Psalm 51:3–6b, 11, 16; Matthew 5:43–48. See also 1st Week of Lent, Saturday, 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Thursday, and 11th Week in Ordinary Time, Tuesday.