Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

If you asked many people today, especially those under age 50, to identify Norman Vincent Peale, they would probably respond with “I don’t know…” or perhaps a blank stare. Yet people throughout the world are familiar with his work. His best-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, has sold millions of copies and has been translated into dozens of languages since it was published in 1952. Peale, an ordained minister as well as a prolific author and popular speaker, urged his readers and audiences: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

The Bible readings that the Church give us today, just a few days before Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent, call us to the spiritual equivalent of shooting for the moon.  From the Book of Leviticus, we are urged, “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” In today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

When I read or hear those words, my first reaction is, “Wow, Lord, you’re not asking me to shoot for the moon. You’re asking me to leave this universe!” How can any human being, prone as we are to sin, be as holy or perfect as God?

But God isn’t asking us to do the impossible. Let’s take another look at those passages. God doesn’t expect us to be as holy as God is but rather as holy as we can be. Jesus doesn’t call us to live up to a divine standard of holiness but rather up to the highest human standard. In other words, he wants us to follow him. Fully human as well as fully divine, he showed us the way.

We don’t share Jesus’ unique nature, but we share some of it. We aren’t divine, but we believe that we were created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). St. Paul’s question to the church in Corinth is also posed to us: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” He goes on to say, “for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”

Because of this, Jesus isn’t afraid to ask those who follow him to a higher standard of behavior:

• Instead of following the lex talonis of “an eye for an eye” (which was originally intended to stop blood feuds and other escalating cycles of vengeance), he tells us to turn the other cheek, to give others the shirt off our back, to go the extra mile.
• Instead of loving our neighbors and hating our enemies, he commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
• He reminds us that God makes sunlight and rain fall on all people, good and bad alike.

In a speech at Rice University in September 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced an audacious and seemingly impossible national goal: to land a man on the moon by the end of that decade. He said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Only seven years later, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Lord asks us to shoot for the moon in following him. Each time we respond—not because it’s easy but because it’s hard—we make a small step in our growth as his disciples and a giant leap as a church toward the kingdom of God. - jc