God’s Desire and Means to Divinize Us, Seventh Sunday (A), February 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
February 19, 2023
Lev 19:1-2.17-18, Ps 103, 1 Cor 3:16-23, Mt 5:38-48

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• There are many demanding aspects of living faithfully the Christian life. As we heard three weeks ago, he summons us to live by the Beatitudes rather than seek wealth, power, sex, fame and approval like so many do in the world. Jesus tells us that to be his disciple, we must deny rather than affirm ourselves, pick up our Cross each day and follow him, a summons on which we will focus during Lent, which begins this Thursday. He tells us that we have to treat the poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, stranger or imprisoned the way we would care for him. He calls us to be brutal in excising sin from our life, even to the point of plucking out our eyes or chopping off hands and feet if there’s no other way to stop using them to sin. He says that we have to make a hard choice between him and money, insisting we cannot serve both God and mammon. He tells us that we have to forgive not just once or twice, but 70 times 7 times.
• All of these are supremely challenging, but I think the hardest part of living the Catholic faith seriously comes in today’s Gospel, when Jesus calls us to “offer no resistance to one who is evil,” to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, to give our clothes and not just our jacket, and, especially, to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. That requires heroic trust in God and unconquerable benevolence. But what’s most amazing of all is that Jesus, in calling us to it, knows that with his grace we’re capable of it! The Gospel is always a gift before a demand and Jesus, in giving us such a demand, wills to give us all the help he knows we need to live up to it. Today, however, we need to recognize that he is in fact calling us to such a measure and open ourselves up to receive his help to achieve it.
• Throughout the whole Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has been calling us, as his disciples, to live by his standards, not by the criteria of others. Last week, he told us that our righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees, who were the most religiously observant Jews. Today he tells us that we need to do better than the tax collectors who love those who love them, than the upright Gentiles who greet and do good to those who greet and do good to them. He calls us to live by God the Father’s standards, which he personifies. Today’s readings all make this point emphatically.
• In today’s first reading from the Book of Leviticus, we see what God commanded Moses to say to all the Israelites: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God am holy.” He tells them both to what standard he’s calling them— not just to be a “good person” but to “be holy” — as well as the reason why: “because I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” He is calling us, in short, to be like him, to live as his image and likeness.
• In the second reading, St. Paul indicates to the Corinthians and how we’re called to become holy like God. “Do you not know,” he asks, “that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? … God’s temple is holy and you are that temple.” Our holiness means allowing God who is “holy, holy, holy” to dwell within us, to grow within us, to love within us, to reign within us. Sometimes we’re tempted to think that the essence of holiness involves thousands of good deeds on our part; rather, holiness means allowing God truly to abide in us, transforming us more and more according to the image in which he created us and for which he redeemed us.
• In the Gospel today, Jesus puts an exclamation point on this primary Christian vocation. He tells us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Before we go any further, we need to note that when we hear this summons, many of us are thrown off by the word “perfect” and think that this is an unachievable standard; after all, none of us is perfect, none of us will ever be perfect, and if God is calling us never to make a mistake, then he’s calling us to something beyond human capacity. We can, therefore, feel justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s either an obviously unattainable goal or conclude that he must be employing hyperbole. Before we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, however, as if Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a few things:
• First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is clearly saying is “Be like your heavenly Father.” After calling us to offer no resistance to evil doers, turn the other check, love our enemies and pray for our persecutors, he tells us why: so “that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” He wants us become true children of our heavenly Father and implies that we will not really become children of God until we start behaving like God, that he can be our Father — through creation, and especially through Baptism — without our being morally his children. The Father wants us to seek to act as his children, to behave like Jesus who shows us how to live as a Son of God. Just as God the Father loves everyone and does good to everyone, including those who curse him, who make themselves his enemy through sin and an evil life, who try to use him whenever they need him, Jesus calls us to a similar rule of life, to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to walk the second mile, to give our cloak as well as our tunic, to respond generously to all those who need to borrow. We’re called to be good — to let our sun or life-giving rain fall — not just on those who are good to us but even on those who are not good to us, just like God the Father does. This, he suggests, is the path to true holiness. This is the means by which we become, in action, sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, by behaving as God the Father behaves. This is the way become Christians not just in name but in action. On the other hand, we cannot be like God the Father or God the Son when we don’t love others enough to forgive them when they hurt us, to pray for them when they persecute us, to sacrifice for them when they’re in need, to avoid all vengeance against them when they strike us on our cheek or otherwise hurt or offend us.
• Second, to understand what Jesus means when he calls us to be “perfect” like our Father in heaven, we have to grasp the Greek word St. Matthew employs. That word is “teleios,” which is the adjective that comes from the noun “telos,” which those who have taken courses in philosophical ethics know means “end” or “goal.” Teleios refers to something fit to achieve its end or purpose. A hammer, for example, is teleios for pounding in a nail. A microphone is teleios for amplification. A student is teleios when he has mastered the material, lives it and can teach it to others. When Jesus calls us — in fact commands us —to be “teleios” as our heavenly Father is “teleios,” he’s not intending that we engage in a type of errorless and sinless perfectionism that may end up destroying our spiritual, psychological and physical lives. Rather, he is summoning us to order our lives to the same purpose and same goal as God the Father, to mature to full stature, to achieve the end for which we were made, which is to be fully in the image and likeness of God, to be holy as God is holy, to love like God loves, to be merciful as he is merciful, to be divinized by him so that we may indeed have our action follow our being and behave truly as children of our celestial Father.
• In order to attain this Christian perfection, God doesn’t leave us on our own but gives us everything he knows we need. The whole of our Christian life is meant to help us to become
  • Prayer is meant to help us to become teleios like God, by helping us to think as God thinks rather than the way everyone else thinks, to help us say and desire that God’s will be done rather than our own.
  • Sacred Scripture is meant to help us to become teleios like God, by imparting to us God’s wisdom and showing us the true path to love like he loves.
  • The sacraments are meant to help us come to become teleios like God, by assisting us from within to become more and more like the one we encounter in the Sacraments, Jesus Christ, who frees us from sin and unites us to himself in baptism, who feeds us with himself in the Holy Eucharist, who forgives us our sins in Confession, who fills us with the Holy Spirit in Confirmation, who conforms men to himself in Holy Orders, who joins a man and woman in one flesh in marriage to become a true loving communion of persons resembling the Trinity, and who helps unite our sufferings and even our death to his in the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick.
  • Our daily life, including even and especially our difficulties, is meant to help us to become teleios like God. This means that when someone slaps us on the cheek, or begs from us, or hates or persecute us, all of it can be used by God to bring us to perfection. This was the path God the Father used to perfect Jesus according to his humanity. The Letter to the Hebrews says, “Although he was Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered and, being perfected (teleiotheis), became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb 5:8-9). Jesus was perfected according to his human nature precisely through his suffering, through living what he calls us to live in today’s Gospel. Jesus was perfected when he didn’t retaliate against the brutal Roman soldiers who slapped him, mocked him and put a crown of thorns on his head. When they took his tunic in order to scourge and crucify him, he allowed them to take his undergarments as well. When they compelled him to walk a mile with the crushing burned of the Cross on his shoulders, he continued two miles, helped by Simon of Cyrene. When he was being crucified, he cried out with love for his enemies and prayer for his persecutors, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” And by his horrendous but salvific death, Jesus made salvation and sanctification possible: he gained for us the graces to be able to love as he loves, to live and die as God’s image and likeness, all the way to the end of life and beyond.
• For us to become perfected, to become holy, to become a true temple of God, however, we just resolve to follow Jesus Christ not just partially, or at a distance, or picking-and-choosing the parts of his teaching that don’t require a radical change on our part, but up close, fully, totally. The whole Sermon on the Mount, like we see in the Beatitudes, is meant to lead us to true happiness, to true spiritual perfection as sons and daughters of God. We need, however, not just to hear Jesus’ message, but believe it, embrace it and put it into practice. We need to give God permission to do in us what he wishes to do in order to sculpt us in his holy image. Just like every dad and mom wants to raise their children to fulfill all of their potential, God wants to raise us to fulfill all the potential with which he has created us, to be holy like he is holy, perfect as he is perfect, fully human and more and more divine. But we have to will it, to persevere in choosing it, to recognize that, though hard, with God’s grace, it’s possible — just as we see in the lives of so many saints.
• There are some Christians who want to pretend that there has to another way, who want to believe we can still fully please God, live a good Christian life, and get to heaven without taking Jesus’ challenging words seriously and literally. Some cling to the idol that as long as we do a few good deeds, come to Mass, pray a little each day, give something to the poor, that that’s all that God wants and demands and that we can therefore live by the same standards by which everyone else lives; to quote Leviticus today, that we can continue to “hate our kin in our heart,” to “reprove our neighbor,” and to “take vengeance.” Rather than striving for sanctity, they want to believe that if someone takes an eye or a tooth from us, we’re justified in taking his eye or her tooth. They want to believe that we’re perfectly okay in slapping someone back who slaps us first, that we’re find in being generous only to those whom we trust and vanquishing our enemy before the enemy gets a chance to attack or eliminate us. They want to believe that we’re fine in loving only those whom we think deserve our love — yes to our grandmothers and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but no to political figures we don’t like as well as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Mustafa Ataturk, Pontius Pilate, Herod and anyone else we’d like to add to the list. Today is the day in which Jesus wants us to recognize that this is not his way. It’s not the way to human fulfillment. It’s not the way to happiness and heaven.
• Paul warns us against this fiction in today’s second reading. He says: “Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” To those who are wise in this age, the whole Sermon on the Mount — from the beatitudes to turning the other cheek and loving even our enemies — is total lunacy, just like they believe that the Cross is utter folly. But those who are truly wise recognize that Jesus’ words alone are the path to eternal life and, with St. Paul, that the Cross is the true power and the wisdom of God, because it is the fullest expression of the divine love that Dante says moves the sun and the stars. Those who are truly wise see that they must become fools in the eyes of the world to become like the Heavenly Father and his Beloved Son. It’s only those who are foolish in the eyes of the world and wise in what pertains to God who will come to this perfection, who will recognize what St. Paul describes at the end of today’s second reading that “everything belongs to you” — the Church, the world, life, death, the present and the future — all things are given to you for your sanctification, indeed, “all belong to you, and [or better, because] you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”
• The Lenten season we begin in three days is meant to help us to become teleios, to live by God’s wisdom and become like God. Lent unites us to Jesus in his 40 days in the desert, in his prayer, in his fasting, in his almsgiving so that we can become, together with him, the image of the Father. Jesus will tell us on Ash Wednesday, “When you pray, … when you give alms… [and] when you fast,” to do so not for the crowds but for the Father who sees in secret and will always reward. Lent is about making us ever more children of the Father, who live for the Father, for the Father’s name to be hallowed, for his kingdom to come, for his will to be done. Lent is ultimately about renewing us in our call to holiness, as we turn away from everything by which we do not live as beloved children of the Father and begin to believe and live the Gospel that Christ enfleshes. Let’s resolve, therefore, with God’s help, to live the best Lent of our life this year! Let’s commit to pray that we might live up to the reality of our having become God’s beloved sons and daughters through baptism. Let’s commit to fast so that we may come to hunger for everything God hungers, for us and for others. Let’s determine to give not just some alms to the poor, but to give of ourselves and our gifts not only to those who do good to us, but, like God, even to those who do not. The holy season of Lent and the whole Christian life are a school in which God tries to help us, day by day, become like him, to become perfect, fit, apt ultimately to share eternal communion with him and all the saints.
• The greatest means by which Jesus helps us to become teleios is through Holy Communion, by which we poor and humble servants eat the Lord and enter into holy communion with Him who is holy, holy, holy. This is an indication of just how much God desires us to be like him, that he would not only allow his Son to take our humanity and enter the world, that he would not just permit him to be tortured and crucified, but that he would go so far as to allow him to take on the miraculous appearances of bread and wine so that we could consume him and become like him whom we eat. But God the Father has done all of this to divinize us so that we might live as his beloved sons and daughters. The Christian life is at times supremely demanding, but God gives us himself so that we might live up to those high standards or ordinary Christian life! As we prepare to receive Jesus today and become, truly, a temple of God, we ask for the grace to cooperate with the Holy Spirit as he seeks to help us fulfill God’s will for us, which is our sanctification and spiritual perfection.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

“You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.
Though you may have to reprove your fellow citizen,
do not incur sin because of him.
Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
I am the LORD.”

Let no one deceive himself.
If any one among you considers himself wise in this age,
let him become a fool, so as to become wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God,
for it is written:
God catches the wise in their own ruses,
and again:
The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise,
that they are vain.

So let no one boast about human beings, for everything belongs to you,
Paul or Apollos or Cephas,
or the world or life or death,
or the present or the future:
all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

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