14 June 2022
Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s Gospel, Jesus continues his discourse on the child-like simplicity of boundless love. It is this love without exception that is the clear sign of being children of our heavenly Father. Jesus concludes with the instruction, “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
These words, however, should not lead us to a lonely and self-obsessed perfectionism, or to a lonely feeling of superiority for being better than the “tax-collectors” and “pagans” of our time. Love is relationship, and only love perfects us. Jesus invites us to transcend the simple categories of good and evil and see ourselves and our brothers and sisters as children of our heavenly Father who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Only his love in us and through us will bring about this perfection.