‘Be perfect,’ but we can’t become holy on our own

7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Lv 19:1-2, 17-18
Second Reading: 1 Cor 3:16-23
Gospel Reading: Mt 5:38-48

“Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel,” God told Moses. “Say to them: ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.’”

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” St. Paul asked the Corinthians. “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Jesus told his disciples.

We are human, not divine. At our birth, even our human nature is fallen, for we inherit the guilt and stain of the original sin of our first parents. That sin was a sin of pride, in which Adam and Eve wanted to be “like God,” but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

We cannot become holy on our own.

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “No one is good but God alone.”

“No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from there – the Son of Man, who is in heaven,” he told Nicodemus.

The only way we can possibly be holy as God is holy is to become incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ, who is God the Son. “Incorporate” comes from the Latin corpus, corporis (“body”).

Even in the Old Testament, says the Catechism, God’s plan was “to make men holy and save them, not as individuals without any bond or link between them,” but rather as “a people,” his chosen people, the Jews.

Now, in the New Testament, Christ calls together a new people, comprising both Jews and Gentiles, whose unity lies not in physical descent from Abraham, nor in circumcision, but “in the Spirit.” This race is “the new people of God”: Christ’s Mystical Body, his Church.

In Latin, “Church” is ecclesia (“assembly”), from the Greek ekklesia (“those called out”). In Greek, the Old Testament uses ekklesia for the Hebrew qahal: the assembly of the chosen people before God.

By using ekklesia for itself, “the first community of Christian believers” identified itself as “heir to that assembly,” says the Catechism. The Church, then, is “the people that God gathers” out of the world. Indeed, the very word – from the German Kirche – comes from the Greek Kyriake (“what belongs to the Lord”).

However, the Church is not just an assembly of believers gathered around Christ; she is the body of members united in him as their head, St. Paul says. In that body, we are the members, or organs, and the Holy Spirit is the soul. Through him, “the whole body grows, and with the proper functioning of the members joined firmly together by each supporting ligament, builds itself up in love.”

Here, “proper” means more than just “correct”; it means “belonging or relating exclusively or distinctively.” The “proper functioning” of the members means the functioning of each member according to the gifts the Holy Spirit has given him for the benefit of the whole body.

It is as members of Christ’s body that we become holy, for it is in his body, the Church, that he communicates divine life to us through the sacraments. Indeed, it is only as organs in that body that we have any lasting personality or identity.

“Through baptism we are formed in the likeness of Christ: for in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body,” St. Paul says. “Really sharing in the body of the Lord in the breaking of the Eucharistic bread, we are taken up into communion with him and with one another: because the bread is one, we, though many, are one body, all of us who partake of the one bread.”

As the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said in his Testament, “Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth, and the life – and the Church, in all her shortcomings, is truly his body.”