"Be ye holy, because I am holy" God said to the children of Israel."Be ye holy, because I am holy" God said to the children of Israel.
"Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect? Jesus Christ said to His disciples.
These words show us that God is at once the motive and the model of our holiness. If we really understand these words, they will teach us more than the wisest and most enlightened philosophers could do. But we shall never understand them, except by the favour of the Divine illumination, and practice will disclose the meaning of them to us far better than speculation.
"Be ye holy" says the Lord God, "because I am holy." Now, what is holiness in God? It is the love of order. God loves order essentially; He cannot approve of anything, excuse anything, surfer anything to go unpunished, which is contrary to it.
He can permit disorder in His creature, bear with it for a time, forgive it freely, if the creature repudiates and amends it; but essentially He hates it, He pursues it, and He punishes it wherever He sees it, when the moment for His justice is come and the time for mercy is past. And why is this? It is because He is holy. He cannot help, if we may dare so to speak, He cannot help insisting on the love of order in His free and intelligent creature; neither can He leave that creature without a recompense if His law of order is observed. He will exercise that creature for a time, afflict him, put him to many trials; He may even appear to abandon him, to be the more sure of his virtue; but if the creature does not swerve from the path of order, if he perseveres constantly therein, God must and will reward him, God must and will make him happy, because of His own holiness.
This essential holiness of God is incontestably the first and greatest motive for our own holiness. We are obliged to love order, because God loves it; our reason and our liberty were only given to us for that reason, that we might understand what order is; liberty, that we might freely submit ourselves to it.
In proportion as we are reasonable creatures, we are made in the likeness of God. God has a knowledge of Himself, God loves Himself as the source of all sanctity, as sanctity itself. We, who are made in His image, must know Him, love Him, obey Him, and imitate Him in this respect. It is not sufficient for us to be made in His image by our spiritual nature, and endowed with intelligence and liberty; we must be so also by our free-will and our choice. I ought to wish to be holy, I ought to labour with all my strength to attain holiness, I ought to reject with horror everything which is contrary to holiness, because God is holy, because I have had the privilege of being created in His image, and therefore His holiness is to be the measure of mine.
How shall I ever dare to draw near to God if I am not holy, or at least if I do not aspire to become so? I was created to have an intimate union with Him, a close communication; a communion of gratitude, for I have received all from Him; a communion of prayer, for I need His help continually; a communion of hope, for I expect every good thing from Him; a communion of love, for He is my sovereign Good, and I can find no happiness but in Him. But what will become of this close communion with God if I give up holiness? It will be absolutely broken. In proportion as I draw away from holiness I shall draw away from God, and He, on His side, will draw away from me. I shall no longer be able to bear the sight of Him; and He will cast me from His presence; He will hate me, He will forsake me, He will condemn me: I shall be eternally separated from Him.
And this is not all. God has drawn me towards Him by His grace, still closer than I am to Him by the order of nature; He has raised me to a supernatural state; He has destined me to see Him face to face and to enjoy His own happiness for ever and ever. Has He not, then, still more right to say to me, "Be holy, because I am holy"? Can I dare to aspire to the eternal enjoyment of an infinitely holy God, can I dare to hope to be closely united to Him, and to share His beatitude, if I am not holy, and even holy with a spotless holiness? What, then, should be my constant and only occupation here below? Should it not be a continual striving to purify myself more and more, to destroy in myself everything that is opposed to holiness, and to acquire all those virtues which can make me pleasing to God? And as I can never succeed in attaining this perfect purity by my own strength, what can I do better than to give myself up entirely to God, that He Himself may sanctify me, and make me all He wishes me to be, that so I may be worthy to stand in His presence?
What! I am eternally to possess Him Who is holy by His very essence, Him Whose holiness is the admiration, the joy, the happiness of the blessed spirits; I am destined one day to exclaim with them for ever, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty;" and yet I am not to labour with all my might to become holy, I am not to employ for that every moment of my life! Why, then, am I upon the earth? What other object is worthy of my desire?
Is there still a more powerful motive yet?
Yes. God says to us, "Be ye holy, because I am holy, because I Myself have united your nature to My own, that I might sanctify it," The Christian is not simply a man; through Jesus Christ, he is made a partaker of the Divine nature; he has become by adoption the son of God the Father, and the brother of the Incarnate Word. Not his soul only, but even his body takes part in this adoption. His very members are the members of Jesus Christ; it is Saint Paul who tells us so. Far more do his soul and all his faculties belong to Jesus Christ. How holy, then, should a Christian be, holy in body and soul, he who is incorporated with the Divine nature! O my God! if only we were penetrated with this truth, as we ought to be, what would be our ardour, our thirst for holiness! I am not surprised now that the Apostles gave no other title than that of "saints " to the first Christians, and this was the custom in the Church for a long time. To-day, would it not be indeed a mockery to give such a title to the generality of Christians? Are they not for the most part in their practice, and many of them in their principles, not saints, but enemies of sanctity? What a frightful change in the aspect of Christianity!
But what is the holiness which is proposed to Christians as a model? No other than that of God Himself: "Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect: " it is our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is God made Man, to teach us the way of holiness, Who addresses these words to us. What do they really mean? Can we, in very deed, be holy as God is holy? No; it is impossible for us to be holy as He is, or even to approach His infinite perfection. But whatever may be our holiness, it must be moulded upon His, which is the only source and the only pattern of all holiness.
And because our eyes are too weak to contemplate holiness, such as it is in God Himself, and because we should be incapable of applying it as a rule for our own conduct, God was made Man, He lived with men, He conversed with them, He instructed them by His discourse, by His example, by His whole life, and gave them, in our nature united to His, a model of holiness which they can understand and imitate. It is, then, no longer a question of saying, "Who shall ascend up to heaven, there to understand, by the contemplation of God Himself, what is the true character of holiness? " Holiness in a human person has come down to earth; holiness was revealed in mortal flesh; holiness spoke and acted as a Man; nothing remains for us but to study the Spirit of Jesus Christ, to conform ourselves to His maxims, to walk in His footsteps. If we do this we shall become perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.
But Jesus Christ is not only the model of our holiness; He is its principle, and its first efficient cause. We can do nothing without His grace; and this grace must act upon our liberty to the utmost of its power if we would become holy as He is. He offers this grace to us continually, and He has promised to increase it in proportion as we correspond with it. But our good use of His grace depends even more upon Him than upon ourselves; and if we well understand our own interests, the wisest and safest plan we can adopt is to give and consecrate to Him our liberty; to beg of Him to dispose of it as His own, and to assure Him that we wish only to act under His direction and only to be guided by His inspiration. Happy are those who give themselves to Him like this, and who never take back their gift! Their holiness will be the work of Jesus Christ; they will have no other part in it than that of allowing Him to do with them according to His good pleasure, of never resisting Him, and of dying to their own heart, their own spirit, their own will, that they may live with the true life of Jesus Christ.
- taken from Manual for Interior Souls, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou