The Call to Imitate God as His Beloved Children, 30th Monday (II), October 24, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Anthony Maria Claret
October 24, 2022
Eph 4:32-5:8, Ps 1, Lk 13:10-17

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• St. Cyril of Alexandria, a fifth century doctor of the church, said about Christians that they are the ones who behave like God. Christians are not those who merely believe in the Trinitarian God revealed by Jesus Christ. Christians are the ones who seek to behave like God with God’s own help, with God’s own love. That’s the message that St. Paul gives to the Christians in Ephesus in today’s first reading: “Be imitators of God, as his beloved children, and live in love.” Christians are called not just to imitate God on the outside out of some type of duty, but having been loved in such a way by God, we seek to imitate that love, live in it, and live by it, allowing God to love others through us, together with our entire personality.
• St. Paul gets specific in his words to the Christians in Ephesus about how they’re supposed to imitate God. Having received God’s mercy — because God’s love for us is always merciful —  we are called to imitate that merciful love toward others. So St. Paul begins today, “Be kind to one another.” The word he uses in Greek, crestos, means that we care about somebody else’s needs just as much as we care about our own. If we were hungry, we’d be looking for something to eat, and therefore if someone else is hungry, we feed them. Just as we like to be clothed, we clothe others. Just like we hate to suffer and are grateful for the care for others, so we care for them. He calls us to be compassionate like God is, taking into consideration another person’s sufferings, even when we might not visibly see them. He tells us to “Forgiv[e] one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” This forgiveness is not just an extrinsic action in which we basically say, “I don’t hold any grudges,” because we know how God forgave us in Christ: by dying in order to take our sins away. Hence we’re called to real sacrifice to reestablish others to a right relationship with God and us. St. Paul adds, “Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Christ’s love for others was sweet incense, a beautiful prayer that rose up to God, in some sense, his greatest worship. St. Paul wants us to imitate that worship, that self-giving loving sacrifice, and make of our life a fragrant offering, sweet smelling incense, rising up to God.
• St. Paul contrasts that type of life and prayer with what he suggests is the foul and fetid odor that some lives that do not imitate God as beloved children emanate. He says that “immorality, any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned about among you. Because this is idolatry.” It’s a powerful point. None of us wants to engage in idolatry, because we believe in God and love him. But whenever we are immoral, we’re de facto worshipping an idol. When we’re acquisitive, we’re putting our treasure not in growing to be more and more like God through receiving his own grace, but placing it in some material thing. Impurity is a type of corrupted love in which fail to see and reverence God in others. Such a life, he says, begins with obscenity or silly and suggestive talk, which he says is out of place among God’s holy ones. The devil often wants us to start with such things inane conversations and make them grow, just like violent crime normally flows from situations where graffiti and broken windows are left unattended. Turning our culture around, St. Paul implies, begins with the way we think and we talk, by eliminating obscenity and the type of sexually suggestive talk that is rampant. If we can change that language that comes from the heart, then it is possible for us to stop more violent expressions of sin. St. Paul emphasizes that when someone is immoral or impure or greedy, when a person engages in idolatry in this way, he has no inheritance in God’s kingdom, because he’s placing his treasure in something other than God. It’s not a punishment, but rather a diagnosis. And so, if we’re living in love as God’s beloved children, if we’re imitating Christ, we need to help people enter the kingdom precisely by overcoming these forms of idolatry that flow from concupiscence. St. Paul warns that there will be lots of empty arguments thrown at us and that we shouldn’t be deceived by them or associate with them. He describes the huge change that happened in baptism and by faith in Christ: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Therefore, our actions should follow our being, and we should “live as children of light.” That is our task. God has filled us with this light, and we seek to reflect that light in all that we do, as imitators of God as his much loved children.
• To imitate God who need to take seriously what Jesus was doing today in the Gospel. Jesus is constantly saying, “Follow me!” And he shows his compassion, his kindness, his mercy here toward a woman in the synagogue on the sabbath, even though he had to suffer for it. A woman enters who was crippled for 18 years and could not look up. Not only did she have a serious physical malady, but she also had a spiritual problem, as the Fathers of the Church commented: she just couldn’t look up toward God. Her eyes were constantly toward the ground. She came into the synagogue because she still wanted God. She still knew she needed God. It was on that Sabbath that Jesus, seeing her completely incapable of standing erect, said to her, “Woman, you are liberated from your infirmity.” What extraordinary words! Jesus didn’t know her name. But he used a vocative nonetheless, one that recalls the beginning of creation, one that foretells how we would call his mother on Calvary. He was going to treat this woman with the care and compassion with which he wanted to treat every woman: “be free of your infirmity.” He laid his hands on her head, at once she stood up straight, and began to glorify God, not just because she was cured, but because she was now able to raise up her heart, with her back and with her chin and eyes and hopes above. Jesus as we see was criticized for this, as he was always criticized for good deeds on the Lord’s day. The Pharisees had gotten to the point at which their own rules, their own fences that they had made around the Mosaic law, had become so important to them, that they thought that on the Lord’s day, they thought they should refuse to love. They thought this lack of compassion would be more ritually pleasing to the Lord than an act of charity, as if the Sabbath was a charity-free zone. “Six days work can be done, come on those days to be cured, not on the Sabbath,” they said, as if a work of love was a blasphemy against God. Jesus expose their hypocrisy, that they cared for their donkeys and oxen,on the Sabbath, but they didn’t really care for their fellow human beings. Imitating God means that we need first to cross the road with godlike love. The whole parable of the Good Samaritan teaches that there is something more important than going to the temple. As important as that is, when somebody is dying, when somebody is hurting, when somebody really needs us, we need to stop. We need to cross. We need to care. We might not be able to solve all the problems. The hero in the parable of the Good Samaritan needed to be on his way as well. But he did what he could at the time and he cared.
• Someone who imitated God as a beloved son, who was kind and compassionate and who helped multitudes spiritually to raise up their minds and hearts toward heaven is the saint the Church celebrates today. St. Anthony Mary Claret was born in Catalunia in 1807. I once happened upon his birthplace walking in the Pyrenees back in 1993. I prayed at the place he was baptized. I pondered the meaning of his life and my life. And since I’ve always had a devotion to him. He was so passionate about spreading the faith, helping others to pray and receive the Lord’s superabundant mercy that he was named a missionary Archbishop of Santiago in Cuba, where he worked so hard for such a long time to help the Cubans grow in faith. He founded the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate to help him in this work. He was recalled to Spain by the Queen to be her chaplain and he used his office, through the power of the queen, to do a tremendous amount of good in changing the culture of the court, in trying to eliminate the silly and suggestive talk, immorality, impurity and greed. In response to efforts and prayers, Christ called many to be “Missionary Sons of the Immaculate” and spiritual sons of St. Anthony. And they were filled with heroism, such that so many Claretian seminarians and priests gave their lives for God and for their brothers and sisters during the Spanish civil war. On the Claretian website, they call themselves a “Martyrial Congregation,” drawing from an assassination attempt suffered by St. Anthony Mary in 1856 in Cuba. And there stories are tremendous testimonies to their faith and courage under extraordinary duress. They have now inherited the kingdom and live in light eternally. They now have their eyes, heads and hearts perpetually turned toward the Lord.
• God wants us to imitate Jesus in his care for this woman, to notice others’ infirmities, their curvatures, whatever can keep them from lifting up their minds, hearts and souls to the Lord. And like St. Anthony Mary Claret to do what we can, together with him, to bring them his love. And to help us, God now gives us himself in Holy Communion, desiring, here in this holy place, to free us from any and every infirmity that prevents our looking up to him and being his missionaries to help everyone else become a fragrant aroma.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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