The Call to Holiness and Personal Vocation

Abstract

We do not call people holy unless they are outstanding morally. Originally, however, the word holy signified the mysterious and awesome reality of the divine. We use the word in that sense in the Gloria: “You alone are the Holy One.” But even those who believed in gods that were anything but morally excellent thought of them as holy. Taking holy to mean the mysteriousness and awesomeness of the divine, people of every religion also used the word to refer to things related to the divinity they worshipped. We too speak of holy pictures and holy water, things incapable of the moral qualities and great charity of a Thomas More or an Angela Merici. How, then, did holiness come to connote moral excellence? In his relationship with Israel, God manifested fidelity and loving kindness, righteousness and compassion (see Ex 34.6–7). And he directed Moses to teach the Israelites to imitate his holiness: “Say to all the congregation of the people of Israel, You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lv 19.2). Because Yahweh not only is mighty and terrible but loving and faithful, his chosen people must walk in his ways, love him, and keep his commandments—which he gives them for their own good. Insofar as God’s people sin, they will not be holy but unlike him and alien to him. The New Testament presupposes the Old Testament’s teaching that God communicates holiness to human beings. The new covenant’s communication of holiness, however, is far more profound, for Jesus is the one “called holy, the Son of God” (Lk 1.35). By perfect obedience to the Father, he frees humankind from sin and radically transforms those who believe in him, so that he can present them to the Father: “holy and blameless and irreproachable” (Col 1.22). Thus, moral excellence is not only required of Christians (see, Rom 6.15–23, 8.1–17, 12.1–2; Gal 5.13–6.10) but realized in them as the fruit of charity—of the love of God poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given them (see Jn 13.34; 14.15, 21–24; 15.9–14; Rom 5.5; 13.8–10; 1 Cor 13; Gal 5.13–16).