7th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

 Homily 3 - 2017

Today’s Gospel sounds somewhat challenging, to say the least: Be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus was echoing a point already familiar to his hearers, that we heard in today’s First Reading: Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. Not unlike Jesus’ audience, we have heard the message before. Like them, hearing it may not have made a noticeable difference to us. The problem, as I see it, may be that we have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear. I wonder if that might always be the case. Remember how Jesus started off his public ministry, The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent; and believe the good news. ‘Repent’ essentially means, not what we have made it mean, but, ‘Think beyond, think more deeply, look again’. For me it means, don’t presume that I have exhausted what it means. Don’t assume that I have heard and put things into practice. We are constantly changing as our lives unfold – or at least, we can be. We are in a better position today to see more, to see differently, than we were a year ago. So, let’s take a fresh look, letting go the familiar – ready to see more deeply.

Be perfect! Be holy! Take holy first. Holy is what God is, what God is like. So, Be holy is to aim to be like God. Some Israelites took that to mean to take their worship seriously. The prophets told them they had got that wrong. Hosea summed it up this way: To live justly; to love tenderly; to walk humbly with your God. In today’s First Reading, we heard, Love your neighbor as yourself. It is easy to get things wrong, isn’t it!

Be perfect! was Jesus’ take on the issue. Essentially to be perfect is to be complete, consistent, inclusive. Jesus invited us to be perfect just as, in the way, in the same sense that, your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus had just described the Father’s way of being perfect, being consistent, being complete: God … causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike. He used the example, in fact, to illustrate in what sense God loves perfectly. No favourites, indiscriminately, obviously without prior conditions - largely unthanked but undaunted.

Do I honestly like that kind of God – the God who sees me as no more, or less, special than those people I do not like, those I reserve the right to criticise? We need to face that one squarely before pretending to go any further. How? I think the only way is to hang around God for as long as it takes to discover for ourselves the beautiful warmth of God’s love, the incredible depth and extent of that love, that does not become less personal simply because it extends out infinitely to embrace everyone; and then to be swept up into it.

We need to keep growing into that kind of loving. We understand it differently across life. Most people tend to want to move in that direction. I hope that that is how parents come to love their children. You love them simply because they are your children. Jesus’ challenge is to move beyond the natural family. He addressed all his listeners, indiscriminately, inviting them to become sons and daughters of your Father in heaven. In the Second Reading, St Paul simply said, You belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Sons and daughters of God – so brothers and sisters of each other. Perhaps it is easier for parents to love their children indiscriminately than it is for brothers and sisters to do so.

Still, we have a head start. Just by living, we share the love energy, the divine DNA, of our parent-creator God, made in the image of that God. Without understanding quite what it means, we become more real, more human, the more we have a go. Until we do, our world remains unchanged.