Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 18, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
February 18, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily:

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, as Jesus takes us further into his famous Sermon on the Mount. As we have pondered the last few weeks, Jesus has been 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. This Sunday 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.
• Jesus this Sunday puts an exclamation point on this calling. “Therefore,” he tells us, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Many people when they hear this are 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 so if God is calling us never to make a mistake, then he’s calling us to something beyond human capacity. We therefore feel justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s clearly impossible. But before we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a couple of things:
• First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is saying is “Be like your heavenly Father.” 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 God’s children, to behave like Jesus who shows us how to live as a son or daughter 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, Jesus implies. This is the means by which we become, in action, sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, by behaving as he behaves.
• 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 he knows 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 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 that when someone slaps us on the cheek, or begs from us, or hates or persecute us, or makes himself an enemy, all of this 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.”
• To become teleios, however, 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 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 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 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. 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. This Sunday Jesus helps us to recognize that such a path is not the way to human fulfillment, happiness and heaven. His path is. And he calls us to follow him on it, wholeheartedly.
• As we prepare for the beginning of Lent in four days, we can focus on how Lent is meant to help us to become teleios. It’s meant to unite 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 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. As we strive, with God’s help,  to live the best Lent of our life this year, we rejoice to have a chance to pray that we might live up to the reality of our having become God’s beloved sons and daughters through baptism, to fast so that we may hunger for what God hungers, and 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. God bless you!

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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