Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 14 2025

Being Holy

A 2006 movie called Love, Actually has one of the best openings in recent years. It begins with two young people running toward each other and falling into each other’s arms, kissing joyfully. Then you see a mother being hugged by her two little girls, then two older women, perhaps sisters, embracing. As these scenes give way to others, you become aware all this takes place in an airport at the arrivals gate. Accompanying these images is a voiceover.

Whenever he feels down about the condition of the world, the speaker goes to the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport in London. Despite the fact that there is so much hatred and greed in the world, he says, Heathrow is one place where things seem different. At Heathrow love is everywhere.

All the while you hear this voice, you are watching people rush into each other’s arms. For a full minute you see the world as a welcoming, warm, loving place. You know it’s something of a set-up because who goes to meet people at airports other than family, good friends, people in a loving relationship? But isn’t this God’s plan for the world, what God wants most from us: love God; love one another.

The voiceover concludes by noting that right before the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City, all the calls that went out were messages of love. People chose to have their final words be professions of love. Making that choice on a daily basis is what makes us perfect—that is, full-grown, complete, holy.

Consider/Discuss

Do you accept Jesus’ idea of what it means to be “perfect”?
If there is someone who has given me reason not to love them, can I pray for them?

Responding to the Word

We pray to God to continue to pour the Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we can love with God’s own love, when our own ability to love fails us. We pray that we can grow into that full maturity that we see in Jesus, who prayed for his enemies from the cross.

Jan 14 2025

Scripture Study for

A life of holiness is patterned after the holiness of God. It requires integrity, honesty, and faithfulness. To be holy as God is holy, we must refrain from nursing hatred in our hearts; we must rebuke wrongdoers or we will share their guilt; we must not entertain vengeance; and we must love others as we love ourselves. These very demanding directives give us a glimpse into the holiness of God. Furthermore, they are all communal in nature. In other words, our likeness to God is determined by the way we relate to others.

For Paul, the temple is the collection of people who gather in God’s name. Just as the presence of God made the Jerusalem temple holy, so the Spirit’s presence in the people makes this new temple holy. Paul returns to an earlier discussion about the wisdom of this world (see last Sunday’s second reading). As valuable as human insight might be, it is nothing compared with God’s wisdom. Boasting refers to the false pride that the Corinthians took in identifying with various religious leaders. Such boasting is evidence of the wisdom of the world, a wisdom that threatened the unity of the Corinthian community.

Jesus addresses the way that disciples are to interact in any strained relationships. He instructs his disciples to offer no resistance when someone tries to take advantage of them. He employs Near Eastern exaggeration to make his point. The disciples are told to disarm others with their willingness to go beyond what is required of them. Jesus then reinterprets the law of love in a most radical manner, telling his disciples that they must love their enemies. He insists that the disciples’ love must be patterned after God’s love, which is given unquestioningly to the just and the unjust alike. The final exhortation succinctly sets the standard for life in the kingdom of heaven. “[B]e perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). It is this standard that makes Jesus’ interpretation of the law so radical.

Jan 08 2025

Be Holy as the Lord Is Holy

When I taught high school theology, on the first day of the semester, I had a student proudly walk into my sophomore morality class with a colorfully decorated binder. She showed off to me her cover picture of Moses holding two stone tablets. On the tablets was written, “The Ten Suggestions.” She grinned at me as only a teenager can, whimsically testing, as if to ask, “What do you, teacher, think about my cleverness in re-casting the Ten Commandments?” with a shrug of the shoulder of “Who do you think you are to tell me what I should do?” Having lived with teenagers at my house for the previous twenty years, I just nodded and smiled. It was going to be an interesting semester.

In the world in which we live, what are we to do with ethical laws and commandments? Are they just “suggestions”? Are there any absolutes? Is anything always wrong? Is anything always right? Is there anyone to Whom we are accountable? Is there really a test at the end of life, or is God such a “nice guy” that no one goes to hell? Who is in charge anyway?

My fifteen-year-old student presumed a world that was kind and benevolent. She may never have experienced killing and war and infidelity and betrayal. Her parents were probably good people. Her friends may have been, too. If that were the case, then why did we need the ten “ethical suggestions”? Our access to God comes through Jesus and does not rely on our perfection, right?

Right, but the flourishing of life certainly does. Forming the heart to love and be generous and prayerful and forgiving—this bears fruit, fruit that lasts, in relationships that are solid and enduring. A holy life is a life worth living.

Consider/Discuss

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out clear principles for holy living, commanding us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. Similarly, the Levitical holiness code reveals how to be holy as God is holy. What does holiness look like in your life? Why does it matter to you?
Does someone you love dismiss ethical laws as though they were just “suggestions”? What life stories could you tell to respond to that person?

Living and Praying with the Word

Lord, sometimes, we throw up our hands at what is happening in our world. There are so many things that we cannot control. Help us to make an impact in the small world in which we live, by living lives of holiness and goodness and prayer. With your grace, please help us. And bless all those who do not believe in you or follow you, for you send blessings on the just and the unjust. We entrust all of that to you—it is not ours, but yours. Thank you for taking this world and carrying it for us.

Jan 08 2025

Scripture Study for

Much of Leviticus focuses on God’s formative intentions for Israel by repeating often the phrase, “Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” These words punctuate a section of ethical and cultic laws scholars call the Holiness Code (chapters 17–26). The command put forward in the reading this week is exemplary of the ethical commands, and it highlights that these commands are meant to form one’s “heart.” One is not to hate even secretly, or to “cherish” a grudge. Instead, Israelites are called to love one another as much as they love themselves. Thus, they will become as holy as their God.

Paul comes back to an earlier concern, which is the divisions among the Corinthians (1:10–17), the fruit of “the wisdom of this world.” Paul, Apollos, and Cephas (Peter) are not leaders of factions, but coworkers and instruments of God’s construction of a temple, the Corinthians as a whole (the “you” here is plural). Divisions form when one considers oneself part of an “in-group” and derives self

worth from that membership (“boasting about human beings”). Paul reminds the Corinthians that their worth comes not from “belonging” to human beings, but to Christ, who himself belongs to God. By virtue of this fact, everything belongs to them. So they can stop trying to gain their worth through posturing and division.

Jesus has been instructing his disciples how the Law is intended to form a certain kind of person. Now he turns to the theme of retaliation. The ancient lex talionis is meant to limit vengeance (Exodus 21:23–24; Leviticus 24:19–20). Jesus deepens this point by commanding his followers to reject vengeance altogether, and further, to respond to demands with generosity. Jesus’ command to love enemies is founded on the observable fact that God also shows kindness to the unjust and the bad (who might be considered God’s “enemies”). Just as Israel was commanded to be holy as God is holy, so Jesus’ followers are commanded to be “perfect” as God is perfect.

Dec 10 2024

Scripture Study for

Although Saul had been chosen by God to lead Israel, he is eventually rejected because of his disobedience. God replaces him with David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). The transfer of power is protracted, however, as Saul refuses to cede to David. In their struggle, David is shown to be both clever and righteous. Despite the fact that he has Saul in his power and can easily kill him, David refuses to do so, recognizing that despite everything Saul is in fact “the Lord’s anointed.” This is one of several scenes illustrating that David, for all his failings and sins, is nevertheless ultimately a man of “justice and faithfulness.”

Having affirmed for the Corinthians that the resurrection of Christ and eventually their own resurrections are real, Paul now turns to the peculiar nature of this resurrection, which involves simultaneously a restoration and a transformation of the “natural” body into a “spiritual” body, which is nevertheless a real “body.” Adam had a natural body and so all his descendants do as well. But Christians also bear the heavenly or spiritual image of Christ, the new Adam. Thus, while we now possess merely natural bodies, we have within us the image of the heavenly Adam, and this image is the “seed,” so to speak, and assurance of the spiritual body we will possess one day.

In his teaching on “doing to others as you would have them do to you,” Jesus challenges his listeners not only to reimagine their response to unreasonable demands, but also (and especially) to reimagine their own self-images. The logic of his teaching demands that they place themselves in the place of those who make such demands, which begins to erode any notion of moral superiority. He pursues this line of thought by pointing out that very often we are only generous with others when we can expect something in return. Our own generosity is often, perhaps rarely, as selfless as we might think. This in turn challenges our comfort in judging others. The ultimate point is that in the end, we are all more or less undeserving of God’s mercy or forgiveness, and yet we all receive it.