Human Perfection as the Image of God, Seventh Sunday (A), February 23, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
February 23, 2014
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 is the text that guided the homily: 

The Christian Standard of Holiness

Over the course of the Church’s study of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount this month, I’ve stressed that the main point of the Sermon is that Jesus is calling us, as his disciples, to live by his standards, not by the standards of others. Last week, he told us that our relationship with God 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 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 what standard he’s calling them to — not just to be a “good person” but to “be holy” — and he told them the reason why: “because I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” He is calling us, in short, to be like him.

In the second reading, St. Paul indicates to the Corinthians and how we’re called to become holy like him. He says, “Do you not know 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. Many times we think the essence of holiness involves thousands of good deeds, things that we do on our own; rather, holiness means allowing God truly to abide in us and us in him in a dynamic way that transforms us more and more into the image and likeness of God in whom we were created. In his homily this morning in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis reminded us, “Christian holiness is not first and foremost our own work, but the fruit of docility — willed and cultivated — to the Spirit of God thrice holy.”

Perfection as God’s sons and daughters

In the Gospel today, Jesus puts an exclamation point on this calling. He tells us, “Therefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Many times when we hear this we’re thrown off by the word “perfect” and think that this is an unachievable standard, because after all, none of us is perfect, none of us will ever be perfect, and therefore if God is calling us never to make a mistake, then he’s calling us to something beyond human capacity. Therefore feel somewhat justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s clearly impossible. Pope Francis this morning said that Jesus’ call seems like an “unattainable goal.” But before we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a few things:

First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is saying is “Be like your heavenly Father.” He was specifically calling us to be like him in particular ways in the Gospel. Earlier in the passage he gave us specific exhortations so that we “may be children of [our] Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Jesus implies that we will not really become children of God until we start behaving like God, that he can be our Father without our being his children unless we experience the inner revolution to which Jesus is calling us and unless we 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, including those who make themselves his enemy through sin and an evil life, including those who try to use him whenever they need him, Jesus calls us to do the same, 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 give 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 the Father does. This 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 he behaves. On the other hand, we cannot be like God the Father 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. The Greek word St. Matthew uses is “teleios,” which is the adjective that comes from the noun “telos,” which means “end” or “goal.” Teleios means fit to achieve its end or purpose. A hammer, for example, is teleios for pounding in a nail. 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 perfectionistic striving for the unattainable that will destroy 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 behave truly as children of our Father.

In order to achieve this Christian perfection, God doesn’t leave us on our own but gives us all the help we need. Everything in our Christian life is meant to help us to become teleios.

• The sacraments are meant to help us come to perfection by assisting us from within to become more and more like the One we encounter in the Sacraments, Jesus Christ, who feeds us with himself, who forgives us our sins, who fills us with his Holy Spirit, who conforms us to himself, who joins us in one flesh with another to become a true communion of persons in marriage and family resembling the Trinitarian interpersonal communion, and who helps unite our sufferings to his.
• The Word of God is meant to help us to become teleios, by imparting to us God’s wisdom and showing us the true path to love like he loves.
• Prayer is meant to help us to become teleios, by helping us to think as God thinks rather than the way everyone else thinks, to help us to say and desire that God’s will be done rather than our own.
• Our daily life, including our sufferings, is meant to help us to become teleios, This means 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, because the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.” Jesus was perfected according to his human nature, precisely through his suffering. He 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 cloak as well. When they compelled him to walk with the Cross on his shoulders, he continued nearly 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. By what he won through this apparent defeat he gained for us the graces to be able to love as he loves, to become not just in name but in action children of the Father living in his image and likeness.

Following Jesus wholeheartedly along this path of holiness

That’s why, to become perfected, to become holy, to become a true temple of God, we need to follow Jesus Christ not just partially, not just at a distance, not just picking-and-choosing the parts of his teaching that don’t require a radical change on our part, but up close, fully, wholeheartedly. The entire Sermon on the Mount, as we see when we ponder 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 to believe it, to embrace it and to 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 any father or mother wants to raise a child to fulfill all of his or her 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.

There are some Christians who want to pretend that there has to another way, that we can still please God, live a good Christian life, and get to heaven without taking Jesus’ words seriously and literally. Some of us want to believe 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 of us, that we can live by the same standards by which everyone else lives; that we can, to quote Leviticus today, continue to “hate our kind in our heart,” to “reprove our neighbor,” and to “take vengeance.” Rather than striving for sanctity, we believe that if someone takes something from us, we’re justified in taking his eye or her tooth, we’re perfectly okay in slapping someone back who slaps us first, we’re fine in loving only those whom we think deserve our love, being generous only to those whom we trust, and vanquishing our enemy before our enemy vanquishes us. Today is the day in which Jesus wants us to recognize that this is not the way to human fulfillment. It’s not the way to happiness. It’s not the way to heaven.  The Holy Father today reminded us all that “Jesus did not come to teach us good manners, how to behave well at the table! To do that, he would not have had to come down from heaven and die on the Cross.  Christ came to save us, to show us the way, the only way out of the quicksand of sin, and this way is mercy.  To be a saint is not a luxury. It is necessary for the salvation of the world.”

Choosing to be wise or foolish

All of this leaves us with a choice. In today’s second reading, St. Paul 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 what Jesus teaches us today about turning the other cheek and loving (having unconquerable benevolence) even toward our enemies — is total idiocy, 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, we know that the Cross is the true power and the wisdom of God. Those who are truly wise see that they must become fools in the eyes of the world in order 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 perfection, who will recognize as St. Paul finishes the second reading today, that “all things are yours —  our lives, the world, life, death, the present and the future — all things are yours, all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” Today Jesus teaches us the true path to have it all. May we respond to his help to cooperate with him in transforming us by Holy Spirit so that we may in fact attain it all, in this world and in the next. Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: