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3.  “You therefore are to be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).

 According to Father Michael Ciccone, OP, in the original language the word which in this verse is translated into English as “perfect” has the meaning of total self- giving love.  This total self-giving love is our vocation as masculine and feminine persons created in God’s image.

To love our enemies is above our nature–it requires grace; but we do not like to be vulnerable and dependent on grace.  And yet we need to receive a continual flow of God’s grace into our souls if we are going to continue to love our enemies.  It’s clear that to be perfect as Our Heavenly Father is perfect requires us to become ever more vulnerable to God’s grace and ever more dependent on His Fatherhood.

Here is where Our Lady can help us.  If we consecrate ourselves to Her Immaculate Heart, then from within this Sanctuary of the Holy Spirit we can pray, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She who was “clothed with power from on high (Lk 24:49) at the Annunciation (Lk 1:35) and again at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4), like the good Mother who She is, desires to clothe us in Her own vulnerability and receptivity to the Word.

2. “But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of Your Father in Heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5:44-45).

 The Father desires to Gift each person with His Eternal Son and the refreshing Reign of His Holy Spirit.  Our supernatural lives depend on our opening to receive these Gifts, just as our natural lives depend on the sun and the rain.  If we who have received the Son and the Spirit through our Baptism refuse to love our enemies, then we cut ourselves off from Our Father Who is Love (1 Jn 4:8), and we close the Door of Love that the Father wanted to open to our enemies.  We hold the key to this Door which opens through the astonishment which occurs when our enemies realize that we love them no matter what they do to us.

1. “Even so let your light shine before men, in order that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:16).

This first mention of the Father by Name in the New Testament shows us how Jesus came to reverse the effects of original sin.

Jesus, later in the same Sermon on the Mount, will say that, “Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Mt 7:17).  People seeing the good fruit in our lives are attracted to the tree.  Unlike the fruit of the” tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 3:9), which also appeared good, but led to the glorification of man in place of God (i.e. death), the fruit of those who do good works so that the Father may be glorified always leads to life.   When our Good Father is known and glorified in His True Nature then we find again the purpose of our existence as His beloved sons and daughters.  This is the Light that “the Light of the World” (Jn 8:12) came to bring to us so that we could in turn spread its radiance everywhere.