Jesus’ Lenten Project to Help Us Become Like God the Father, Saturday of the First Week of Lent, February 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Matthew Parish, Windham, NH
Parish Day of Recollection: “Eucharistic Help for a Holy Lent:
The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”
Saturday of the First Week of Lent
February 24, 2024
Dt 26:16-19, Ps 119, Mt 5:43-48

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• The whole point and purpose of Lenten season is to help us become who we’re supposed to be, to grow in the image and likeness of God in which we’ve been made. This holy season is a gift is for us to become fully Christian in identity and behavior — and that involves rediscovering or deepening our relationship with God in the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit. On Ash Wednesday, we pondered how Jesus calls us to give alms, fast and pray differently from everyone else, doing each of these things in communion with our Father who sees in secret. We’re supposed to give alms recognizing that all that we are able to give to others we have first received from God the Father, and so our giving is an extension of his own loving Providence. We’re supposed to fast in order to hunger for what he hungers. We’re supposed to pray by meeting God the Father in our “inner room,” the locked “storeroom” in a Jewish house where all valuables were kept, indicating to us not only are we supposed to treasure God most but also his love in coming to meet us in the tiny “closet” of our interior life, whether we’re praying at home or in the middle of a multitude.
• Lent is the time in which with God’s help we reorder our relationship with God through prayer, our relationship with others through almsgiving, our relationship with ourselves through fasting and self-denial. It’s a time to convert our hearts, our insides, our motivations, our aspirations, so that from the inside out, in all our actions, we might live as true Christians, in the love of God the Father. Lent is the time when we relive the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when we come to our senses as to how we’ve treated God as if he were not a loving Father, wandered from his house, squandered the inheritance he has given us and make the journey home. It’s a time when he runs out to meet us, to cleanse us, to restore us to our full dignity and to rejoice with us at our conversion. It’s the time when God the Father invites us to enter into his own merciful, loving heart and become his children. Lent is about becoming more and more Godlike.
• That’s what today’s Gospel passage is about. Jesus puts an exclamation point on our Lenten and Christian summons. He tells us, “Therefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Just a Jesus called us to a higher righteousness than the scribes and Pharisees, considered at the time the most religious Jews, so Jesus here reiterates his high standards for us, which is a sign of his confidence of what, with his grace, we are capable. Often when we hear Jesus’ words 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, we can feel somewhat justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s clearly an unattainable goal. But lest we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a couple 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 childrenof 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 to 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 shine and 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. 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 must grasp the Greek word St. Matthew employs. That word is “teleios,” which is the adjective that comes from the noun “telos,” which means “end” or “goal.” Teleios refers to something fit to achieve its end or purpose. A hammer, for example, is teleiosfor 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 equilibrium. 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 achieve this Christian perfection, God doesn’t leave us on our own but gives us all the help we need. 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. Everything in our Christian life is meant to help us to become
  • Prayer is meant to help us to become teleioslike 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.
  • Our fasting and our almsgiving are meant to help us to become teleios, by helping us to hunger for what God hungers for and to become generous and providential toward others like God has been toward us.
  • Sacred Scripture is meant to help us to become teleioslike 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 teleioslike 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 burden 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.
• There are some Christians who want to believe 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, attend Mass, pray a little, give something to the poor, that that’s all that God wants and demands and that we can otherwise live by the same standards by which everyone else lives. 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 fine in being generous only to those whom we trust, loving only those who have not betrayed us, and vanquishing our enemy before the adversary gets a chance to attack or eliminate us. Today 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. Pope Francis reminded us all several years ago that “Jesus asks those who would follow him to love those who do not deserve it, without expecting anything in return, and in this way to fill the emptiness present in human hearts, relationships, families, communities and in the entire world. … 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.” Spiritually we cannot be God’s children without the interior revolution the Lord is inviting us to here, to become his children.
• In the first reading today, Moses said, “This day the Lord, your God, commands you to observe these statutes. Be careful then to observe them with all your heart and with all your soul. Today you are making a covenant with the Lord: he is to be your God and you are to walk in his ways and observe his statutes, commandments and decrees and to hearken to his voice.” And in the Psalm, we ponder how blessed are the people who don’t just know but follow the Law of the Lord, who walk in his law, who observe his decrees, who are firm by keeping his statutes, who seek him with all their heart. Today the Lord Jesus wants us to help us become blessed in that manner. He summons us to observe what he tells us in the Gospel with all our heart and soul, and to open ourselves to receive from Him the grace of the new and eternal Covenant in his blood, here given for us, so that we may actually live up to his standards and become teleios as he was teleios from the inside out. If we embrace this reality with all our heart and continue to embrace it in little things, then  we will experience the blessedness of all those who follow the law of the Lord!
• As we enter more deeply into this parish retreat in which we ponder the practical reality of the gift of the Eucharistic Lord in our life, we finish by recalling that the greatest means by which Jesus helps us to become teleiosis through Holy Communion, when we poor and humble servants eat the Lord and enter into holy communion with Him. This is an indication of just how much God the Father desires us to become 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 grow to be 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 may at times be supremely demanding as we seek to imitate Jesus in picking up our cross, in turning the other cheek, in going the second mile, in praying for persecutors and loving those who have made themselves our enemies, but God gives us himself so that we might live up to those high standards of 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 become teleios, to fulfill God’s will for us, which is our sanctification and, indeed, spiritual perfection.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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