Be Holy As Your Heavenly Father Is Holy

02-19-2023Weekly ReflectionFr. Manasseh Iorchir, VC

The Gospel passage this weekend is a completion of the subunit in the “Sermon on the Mount” corpus where Jesus engaged His disciples in a discourse on the Law. This subunit can be found in Matthew 5:17-48 and deals with Jesus’ teaching of the irreplaceability of the Law of God which can be truly observed from the pure motive of love. In the first part of this subunit, Jesus makes use of four of the Commandments to deepen our understanding of the Law by insisting on, not only external observance of the Torah, but also on true internal conversion that admits only love as the genuine motive of the Law. Jesus completes the discourse on the Law, through critical examination and elucidation of two more articles of the Law, how the virtue of His would-be disciples must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, transcending external observances and mere religiosity to embrace true Christian Spirituality which aims at Holiness in radical imitation of God’s holiness.

The First Reading provided a background to what Jesus would elucidate in the Gospel passage. In the Book of Leviticus, God directed Moses to instruct the People of Israel to be Holy as God is Holy. This invitation to participate in Divine Holiness is followed by an explanation of some of the required ingredients of Holiness. The adherent of the Law is instructed to neither bear hatred against his neighbor nor take revenge for offenses committed against him, but to love his neighbor as he loves himself. The existence of this Commandment in the Torah clearly testifies to the orthodoxy of Jesus’ teaching that prohibited revenge, resentment and grudges against one’s neighbor. However, this Commandment as found in the Torah prohibited hatred, vengeance and grudges only against one’s “neighbor” and “brothers,” it was limited in its extent to fellow Israelites. What Jesus did was to expand the kind of loving relationship God commanded between individual Israelites to include all human beings. Israel had been a laboratory or exercise room where the law of love was put into practice first, in a constrained environment, a law that had been further constrained by the skewed interpretation of the religious elites who permitted “controlled” vengeance and restricted in scope the obligation to love only those who held mutual sentiments. Jesus revealed the true intent of the law of love and expanded the scope of its principle and practice to all humanity.

Recall that the springboard on which Jesus leaped into the elucidation on the law of love was “if your righteousness does not exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisee, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.” Thus, whereas the religious elites permitted proportionate vengeance as justice, Jesus admonished His disciples to aim higher by not seeking revenge at all; and whereas the Pharisees and Scribes taught the people to love fellow Israelites who share mutual sentiments, Jesus directed His disciples to do something more difficult and radical: love even those who hate you. This is the high point of divergence between the interpretation of the law of love by the Rabbis and Jesus’ teaching on the same principle. Love for even those who hate you is also a significant departure from human nature and a principle that sets Christianity apart when truly practiced. However, this expansion of the law of love to include the love of even those who hate us is a sure way of demonstrating our level of imitation of the Holiness of God. The Christian who wishes to love like God loves, to be Holy as God is Holy must strive not only to love those who are likely to reciprocate his love, but also those who evidently hate him. This is a difficult principle to practice, but Jesus demonstrated that it is practicable by forgiving those who ridiculed him as He endured His passion on the Cross.

May we be aided by Grace to desire and seek to imitate God’s perfection.

Please be kind and may God bless you.

Fr. Manasseh

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