February 19, 2023
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 19, 2023 – Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23; Matthew 5:38-48
I am sure you have been in a situation, perhaps in a doctor’s office or someplace else, where someone has said to you, “Let me do this real quick.” “Let me take your blood pressure real quick.” “Let me just give you this injection real quick.” “Let me take some blood real quick.” Of course, there is no such thing as real quick. Blood pressure takes as long to take as it takes. An injection takes as long to give as it takes. But two generations of functioning adults now, who work for us and with us, grew up being told as children, “Let me do this real quick,” in order to not have a temper tantrum or an episode of fright or anxiety.
The other thing you hear those two generations say quite frequently is, “Perfect.” You buy something with your credit card, and they hand you a receipt to sign, and you sign it and they say, “Perfect.” No, it’s not. It might have been the sloppiest signature you ever gave. It’s perfect. Because, growing up, not to hurt their wounded little hearts and souls, every time they did something, like color outside the lines, they were told it was perfect because at least they didn’t break the crayon while they were coloring. But we are stuck, now, with these two phrases in society - perfect and let me do this real quick. And I was reminded of that when I read today’s Gospel. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And I said to listen to the quotation in the first reading that Jesus changes in the Gospel, and that was it.
In the first reading in the Book of Leviticus, after we are told to love your neighbor as yourself, the writer says, “Be holy as the Lord your God is holy.” And Jesus changed that to, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” So, we are going to talk about what both of those things mean.
I don’t speak or write any Hebrew, so I didn’t bother looking it up in the original Hebrew. But I looked it up in the Greek in the Septuagint, the Old Testament, the only one we have. I looked up Leviticus there, and the word that’s used is hagios, be holy. Hagios. Hagios is a very strange sounding word, but we encounter it twice. Right now, in earthquake-torn Istanbul, they’re worried about the Hagia Sophia. The most beautiful Christian church in the ancient world which then became the most beautiful mosque in the Muslim world. It’s right in downtown Istanbul because that was Constantinople when the church was built. The Hagia Sophia means the holy wisdom, the Church of the Holy Wisdom.
We also have the very little used English word hagiography. A hagiography is a biography of a saint. They also use the word, now and then, in secular publishing, for the biography of somebody whom everybody considers to be a real noble character. Hagiography.
But the original Hebrew word that’s used there means separate. God is separate from us. He is the totally other. The one who is unknowable. God only reveals himself through His glory. His glory is the external manifestation of God and creation and the acts of human beings. It was St. Irenaeus who said, “The glory of God is a human being, operating at his or her fullest capacity.” At their fullest height. So, God reveals His glory to us or His self to us only through outside manifestation because he is totally other, totally apart from us. The Hebrew people were told, from the time of Leviticus onward, to “be holy, as God is holy.” What it meant is to separate yourself from everything unclean. To separate yourself from everybody unclean. It resulted in a society apart from the rest of the societies in the Mediterranean. And, of course, the Hebrew people always broke that law in Leviticus because, in order to make money, in order to even make a living, they had to deal, almost on a daily basis, with people who were unclean, uncircumcised and followed other Gods. So, it was a challenge for people to be holy as God is holy. But it was the key to loving your neighbor as yourself.
So, Jesus changes it. But, before he changes it, He talks about something else. He talks about turning the other cheek, and going the extra mile, and giving more than is demanded from you. And, to us, that sounds like simply giving in. But that is not what he was saying at all. He is saying that, when you are confronted with a challenging situation, one that is painful or unfortunate for you, instead of responding with the instinct that human beings have, the fight or flight instinct, to enter more fully into the experience and find there a way to assert yourself. To grow into a different and better version of yourself by the crisis that you are involved in. Find a way. And it’s after saying that, that He then says, “So, therefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
So, I snuck a peek at the Greek word for that, too. It’s very interesting what Greek word is there. Because the Greek word that is there is not perfect, it’s teleios, which means end. “Be end like your heavenly Father is end.” And the English translation couldn’t possibly do that because it would sound stupid. What the Greek really means is be completed. But God cannot be completed, because God is complete at all times. God is infinitely complete and ever complete. So, translating it as, “Be completed as your heavenly Father is completed,” would have wound up in an English heresy. So, how to render what Jesus is getting at here.
The word means “to come to the end of a process.” That’s what it means. To come to the end of a process. So, what Jesus is saying is, “To be like God is, you must come to the end of the process of being human. You must be human to the nth degree.”
Yesterday, I went to a memorial Mass for Sister Kevin John Shields, who was the Director of Religious Education here in Sullivan County for time immemorial, really. Three or four generations of kids had her controlling their religious education. Before the Mass began, two people got up to speak. One of them was a young woman in her early twenties, who got up to speak about what it was like having Sister Kevin John be in charge of the teenage clubs in Sullivan County. How much it meant to her to have a grownup, who wasn’t her mother or father, that she could confide in and get advice from and see a grown woman modeled in. And then, a woman about fifty years old got up to speak, who had worked under Sister Kevin John, in religious education, for all of her volunteer life. And she said exactly the same things that this just-recently teenager said. And, what interested me was not the great things they said about Sister Kevin John, because those things are true anyway. What interested me, was that the two woman, approximately two, maybe three, generations apart, said the same thing about Sister Kevin John’s influence in their process of growing as Catholic human beings. That was the remarkable thing. That they both singled out the same qualities. They were talking about what Jesus talks about in the Gospel. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” means “come to completeness in your life, the same way that God in God’s self is complete.”
It takes a lot of doing. You can’t do it, unfortunately, real quick. But at the end, someone else will say to you, “Perfect.”