Being holy as God is holy is not easy. As the late Rich Mullins sang: "It's hard to be like Jesus." Our long first reading, taken from the “Holiness Code” found in the Book of Leviticus, is something of a commentary on the Ten Commandments. The first three of the Ten Commandments are about loving God, which is distinct from, though inextricably tied to, the final six commandments about loving your neighbor.
What about the fourth commandment, you might ask? Well, the fourth commandment, about honoring your parents, is unique, just like the space parents or, you as a parent, occupy is unique- between God and other people. But that is a homily for another day.
Our reading from Leviticus ends with the exhortation to love your neighbor as you love yourself.1 Hence, our Gospel, taken from Matthew, the most Hebraic of the Gospels, reads like an extension of our first reading.
Taken together, today’s readings are about what it means to be holy: doing right, being good, being kind, compassionate, and caring. Being holy, in a word, is to love. Being holy means loving perfectly. Loving perfectly is to love like Jesus loves: without measure and without counting the cost.
Love, in a Christian sense, is not in the first or the last instance about affectivity, about how you feel either about what you do (you don’t do good so you can feel good about yourself- the amount of good you’re capable of doing is dwarfed by one person’s needs, let alone those of the whole world) or who you do it for. After all, if you’re a Christian, you love and do good even to your enemies. Honestly, how do you feel about them?
Christians strive to be neighbors to everyone they meet, even as they recognize that, concretely, their neighbor is the person they encounter who needs their help. Thomas Merton stated this clearly: “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.”2
In our Gospel for this First Monday of Lent, one all of us have heard many times before, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned. To serve them is to recognize Jesus Christ in what Saint Teresa of Kolkata frequently referred to as “his most distressing disguise.”
Genuine holiness doesn’t seek or even desire credit for righteous deeds. For the holy person, her righteous deeds are merely an extension of the love of God she herself has received and experienced. By performing righteous deeds, a holy person recognizes that he remains an “unprofitable” servant because he has only done what he was “obliged to do.”3
Starting this first full week of Lent, seek out opportunities to help someone in need. Prudentially assist that person. Let your only criterion be that they need some help. And then follow Jesus’ advice from our Ash Wednesday Gospel: “do not let your left hand know what your right is doing.”4
In a verse of his song “Distressing Disguise,” which title he took from Mother Teresa’s description of Jesus, Christian singer/songwriter Michael Card gets it quite right:
Every time a faithful servant serves
A brother that's in need
What happens at that moment is a miracle indeed
As they look to one another in an instant it is clear
Only Jesus is visible for they've both disappeared 5
1 Leviticus 19:18.↩
2 Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, 143. New York: Macmillan, 1976.↩
3 Luke 17:10.↩
4 Matthew 6:3.↩
5 Michael Card, "Distressing Disguise."↩
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