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
This Sunday’s Gospel Reading continues Jesus’ “definitive interpretation” of the Old Law: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven.”
That seems to be the key: “so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven.” The First Reading foreshadows it: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” The Second Reading echoes it: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?… God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”
Moses first encountered God’s holiness when God called out to him from the burning bush: “Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” Moses “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”
“Holy” is used to translate the Hebrew kadosch, which means “consecrated” or “sacred,” set apart from this world. We are accustomed to thinking of God as a father, who loves us so much that he gave up his only son, God the Son, to ransom us from Satan. However, we should also remember that he is the Creator, our creator. As his creatures, we must be imbued with what the prophet Isaiah called “fear of the Lord,” one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
This fear is filial, not servile. It is not flight from threat, nor pure terror, nor simply alarm or fright. It is experience and knowledge of God as utterly holy, totally other, incomprehensible, absolute, almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing, and absolutely majestic. It is reverence for God as God, whom the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable.”
“Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude,” the Catechism says. “We cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”
Nevertheless, the Catechism says, we are all “called to holiness.” It quotes Christ: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
How can this be possible? Even if we were not attached to so much that is not holy, how could we ever even approach God, let alone be holy as he is holy?
Almost unbelievably, God has made it possible, and the Catechism tells us how: we must “use the strength dealt out to [us] by Christ’s gift.” We are invited to a “mystical” union with Christ. It is called “mystical” because “it participates in the mystery of Christ through the Sacraments,” which are also called “the holy mysteries.” United to Christ through them, we participate in “the mystery of the Holy Trinity.”
However, the Catechism warns, “the way of perfection passes by way of the cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle.” That is why the Church’s liturgical year includes Lent, which begins next Wednesday, Feb. 26.
“It is in the Church, in communion with all the baptized, that the Christian fulfills his vocation” to holiness, the Catechism goes on. In the Church we receive the “word of God,” the “grace of the Sacraments,” and the “example” of Mary and the saints.
It is possible, then, for us to share God’s holiness. The unimaginable task of achieving intimate unity with our Creator becomes, in daily life, the task of doing what Jesus tells us in the Gospel Reading: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
