{"id":6002,"date":"2014-03-15T00:42:13","date_gmt":"2014-03-15T00:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.catholicpreaching.com\/?p=6002"},"modified":"2016-02-19T20:01:30","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T01:01:30","slug":"spiritual-perfection-first-saturday-of-lent-march-15-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/spiritual-perfection-first-saturday-of-lent-march-15-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"Spiritual Perfection, First Saturday of Lent, March 15, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fr. Roger J. Landry
\nCasa Maria Retreat House of the Sister Servants of the Eternal Word, Irondale, AL
\nRetreat on Pope Francis, The Reform of the Church and Us
\nMarch 14-16, 2014
\nDt 26:16-19, Ps 119, Mt 5:43-48<\/p>\n

To listen to an audio recording of the homily, please\u00a0click below:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The following text guided the\u00a0homily:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The whole point of Lent is to become like God the Father. The whole purpose of Lent 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\u2019re 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\u2019re supposed to fast in order to hunger for what he hungers for. We\u2019re supposed to pray by meeting God the Father in our \u201cinner room,\u201d the locked \u201cstore room\u201d 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 \u201ccloset\u201d of our interior life, whether we\u2019re praying at home or in the middle of a multitude. Lent is the time in which with God\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 Christians ought, 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s also a time when even when we remain in the Father\u2019s house by not committing serious sins but still don\u2019t relate to him with love as a beloved son and to others as beloved siblings, like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal son who never once disobeyed the Father\u2019s orders but who failed to grasp the Father\u2019s heart and joy at the read of his \u201cdead\u201d and \u201clost\u201d son, that we, too, enter into the loving logic of the Father who has made us in his image and likeness. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what today\u2019s Gospel passage is about. Jesus puts an exclamation point on this Lenten and Christian calling. He tells us, \u201cTherefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.\u201d Many times when we hear this we\u2019re thrown off by the word \u201cperfect\u201d 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\u2019s calling us to something beyond human capacity. Therefore feel somewhat justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it\u2019s clearly impossible. Pope Francis back on Feb 26 said that Jesus\u2019 call seems like an \u201cunattainable goal.\u201d But before we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn\u2019t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a few things:<\/p>\n

First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is saying is \u201cBe like your heavenly Father.\u201d 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 \u201cmay 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.\u201d Jesus implies that we will not really become children of God until we start behaving like God<\/i>, 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\u2019re called to be good \u2014 to let our sun or life-giving rain fall \u2014 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<\/i>, 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\u2019t love others enough to forgive them when they hurt us, to pray for them when they persecute us, to sacrifice for them when they\u2019re in need, to avoid all vengeance against them when they strike us on our cheek or otherwise hurt or offend us.<\/p>\n

Second, when he calls us to perfect like our Father in loving our enemies, he\u2019s using a special word. There are four Greek words for love. The first is storge<\/i>, the type of loving affection we have more what\u2019s familiar to us, for our brothers and sisters, for our cousins, even for things like our home, or our favorite chair. We\u2019re not called to love our enemies with this affection. The second is philia<\/i>, which is the love of friendship, a type of second self. There have been many saints over the course of time who believed and practices that the way not to have any enemies is to make one\u2019s enemies one\u2019s friends, but this is not what Jesus is asking of us. There\u2019s no reciprocity in good, after all, between us and those who are bent on hurting or persecuting us. The third type of love is eros<\/i>, which means romantic love. Jesus isn\u2019t calling us to marry our enemies. The word Jesus uses is agape<\/i>, the same word he uses when he calls us to love others as he has loved us. This means \u201cinvincible goodwill,\u201d \u201cunconquerable benevolence.\u201d No matter what others do to us, no matter how they treat us, not matter how much they grieve or injure us, we will never allow bitterness against them to invade our hearts. This means that the love to which Jesus is calling us won\u2019t be a thing of the emotions or the heart but of the will. God\u2019s agape for us, loving us while we were making ourselves his enemies through sin, gives us the power to love those we do not like. This love for our enemies, this invincible good doesn\u2019t prohibit punishing others, protecting ourselves against them, but it does require that we do so to help reform them and prevent their doing evil. It\u2019s aimed at helping them rather than taking revenge. And the way we learn how to love our enemies by his praying for them, which is why Jesus immediately after calling us to love our enemies calls us to pray for our persecutors. It\u2019s hard to pray for someone and hate them at the same time.<\/p>\n

Third, to understand what Jesus means when he calls us to be \u201cperfect\u201d like our Father in heaven, we have to grasp the Greek word St. Matthew employs. The Greek word St. Matthew uses is \u201cteleios<\/i>,\u201d which is the adjective that comes from the noun \u201ctelos,\u201d <\/i>which means \u201cend\u201d or \u201cgoal.\u201d Teleios <\/i>means fit to achieve its end or purpose. A hammer, for example, is teleios<\/i> for pounding in a nail. A student is teleios<\/i> when he has mastered the material, lives it and can teach it to others. When Jesus calls us \u2014 in fact commands us \u2014to be \u201cteleios<\/i>\u201d as our heavenly Father is \u201cteleios<\/i>,\u201d he\u2019s 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<\/i>, 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<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In order to achieve this Christian perfection, God doesn\u2019t 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. <\/i><\/p>\n