Lent Week 1 Saturday - Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect

Readings: Deuteronomy 26: 16-19; Psalm 119: 1-8; Matthew 5: 43-48

Today’s Gospel passage, in which Jesus tells us to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us, is perhaps one of the most daunting in the whole Gospel. How are we meant to manage that? And why should we? The answer to the first question can be found, to some extent, in the answer to the second.

During this season of Lent, we prepare ourselves by prayer, self-denial and charitable deeds to celebrate the mysteries of the Cross and Resurrection, in which we see revealed God’s love for us, for whose sake while we were at enmity with Him through sin, he sent his Son to die on the Cross, and thus to consecrate us to himself. It is in response to the boundless love revealed in Christ that we are called to imitate the Father’s perfection: just as, in the reading from Deuteronomy, we hear that the people of the Old Covenant are called to obey the commandments because God has made them a people sacred to himself, so we, who have been incorporated into the New Covenant by baptism, must try as best we can to live up to the great gift that has been given us. But how? On our own, we cannot: we must allow God’s grace, which is that same gift of his love working in us, to guide us.

This Lent, then, as we try through self-denial to become more responsive to God’s will and through almsgiving to follow his example of love, let us pray that he will grant us the grace to grow towards the perfection which he shows us and to which he calls us all.