Friday, Twenty Second Week in Ordinary Time

There is a striking statement about Jesus in today’s first reading, ‘God wanted all perfection to be found in him’. It could be said that Jesus was the perfect human being because, in the words of the reading, he was ‘the image of the unseen God’. We are all made in the image of God and we become fully human, perfect humans, to the extent that we are images of God. According to the first letter of Saint John, God is love, and the more we are images of God who is love, the more God’s love shapes our lives, the more fully human we will be. Jesus was the fullest possible image of God’s love. He was God’s love in human form, which made him fully alive as a human being, the one in whom all perfection is to be found. Our calling is to allow Jesus, the risen Lord, to live in us, so that we become as fully human as he was. Because all perfection was to be found in Jesus, he could not be contained by the religious traditions of the time. In the language of the gospel reading, he was like new wine that could not be contained by old wineskins. He was like a whole new cloak that couldn’t just be patched on to an old cloak. With his coming, everything was being renewed, including the regulations relating to fasting. However, Jesus came not just to renew the religious traditions of his time. He came to renew ‘everything in heaven and everything on earth’ in the words of the first reading. Above all, he came to renew all of humanity. The love he released into the world, the fire he set ablaze, was to renew the whole human race. The risen Lord has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit to renew us in his image, so that we become fully alive as human beings, as loving as he is. It is only as we allow the risen Lord to renew us in his love that the face of the earth will begin to be renewed.