7th Sunday in OT 2020
Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; 1Cor 3:16-23; Matt 5:38-48.
Are you holy?
“No!” I hear you cry. “Am I heck!” I beg your pardon, but you are. Weren’t you listening to St. Paul when he said “Didn’t you realise that you were God’s Temple, and that the Spirit of God was living...” well, where exactly?
The Jerusalem Bible says “among you”. That is a possible translation, but a more obvious one would be “in you”. The original Greek is en humin which can be translated “among you” but “in you” would be the more usual way of expressing it.
Either way, St. Paul is stating very clearly that you and I are holy. He goes on to emphasise the point: “The Temple of God is hagios”—the Jerusalem Bible says “sacred” but we could equally well say “holy”—“and you are that Temple”.
So Paul leaves us in no doubt. He tells us twice that we are God’s Temple. How can that be? Remember that Jesus is the true Temple, replacing the Jerusalem Temple: we are the Body of Jesus, as the Church. Therefore, we are the Temple. So by definition, we are holy.
What is it in particular which makes the Temple holy? It is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So as the Body of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we couldn’t be much holier, not because of anything that we have done, but simply by the actions of the Holy Trinity.
Perhaps when you go home today, or to your room, you should look in the mirror, and say to yourself “That person at whom I am looking, who is looking at me, who is me, is holy: that person is the Temple of God, and the Holy Spirit lives in him/her”. Convince yourself that it is true, and then look at the people around you, and realise that they too are holy, because they are your neighbour and you are commanded to love them “as yourself”—in other words, as being you.
Right then, we have established that you are holy, but are you perfect? “No!” you say again, All right, I will grant you that one. Why are you not perfect? Because “perfect” comes from the Latin “perfectus” meaning “thoroughly made”, “complete”, and none of us will be complete this side of eternity. We are working our way towards it: in this life, perfection is a process, not a state. Remember that the Letter to the Hebrews states that Jesus was made perfect through suffering. Even the Son of God was incomplete until He had shared and surpassed human suffering.
Yet that same Son of God tells us to be perfect, so we have to work at the process of becoming complete. How do we do that? Two messages seem to stand out from the Gospel: to love our enemies, and to be constantly willing to give.
“That’s all right” you may say. “I don’t have any enemies”—or you may have. But is there anyone who really winds you up, makes you angry, so that you find yourself shouting at the telly, for instance? I tend to become furiously angry when people attack the Church, either from without, or from within. Are these the people whom I must make a special effort to love? As a first step, I make myself pray for anybody with whom I have become especially cross; but I have still a long way to go.
As for the giving and the non-resistance, I think of how priests in parishes are driven up the wall by the stream of people who come to the door with endless cock-and-bull stories as an attempt to obtain money. When I was in Morecambe, I called at the vicarage of the local Anglican church, which was about half a mile further into the notorious West End than was my own church, and the vicar’s wife burst into tears as she described how such people were driving her to the edge.
How do we respond to the habitual doorbell ringers and tale spinners? We have to muster as much patience as we can, whilst recognising our own needs and limitations. The story is told of a holy and generous parish priest who, during the Toxteth riots of 1981, was constantly on the front line, counselling people, mediating between opposing parties. One night, some rioters broke into his home and threatened him, and he was subsequently seen chasing them down the street, belabouring them with his walking stick, and shouting “Get out of here, you people of questionable parentage!” Even saints have their limits.
