THE WORD AND THE SAINT
June 13, 2025 - Celebrating St. Anthony of Padua
2 Corinthians 4: 7-15; Matthew 5: 27-32
To a curious mind it would be important to insist that the etymology of "adult" and "adultery" are certainly not the same... because the tendency today is to justify adultery as an ambit of adults, a way of life for the adults to decide - that is a risky moral decadence!
The Word today invites us to reflect on our call to refrain from adultery. Hence it becomes pertinent to answer the question, what is adultery? Is it merely an act of biological, physiological, sexual aberration in persons? Yes, and no. Yes, because it is so literally. No, because it is not merely that, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel today. That takes us to the etymology that we were speaking of earlier.
Adultery as we know comes from the two terms - "ad" and "alterare" which mean respectively towards and altering... it is doing something towards altering the original nature of something - adulterating.
We are created in the image and likeness of God and whatever leads us towards altering that nature of ours, is an adultery - be it seeing, hearing, doing, going or whatever. And Jesus tells us - find out what is that which makes you alter your course in life, making you move away from being children of God, remove it at its root and you shall grow to be a true son or daughter of God!
But is it really possible for us to do? We are weak, fragile, and conditioned...precisely in this earthenware has the Lord placed the precious divine image and likeness! How carefully we need to care for it! That is our Christian vocation. It requires an unquestioning recognition and uncompromising appreciation of the treasure that we have inside and the call to preserve it. That is called an Absolute Choice for God. St. Antony whom we celebrate today, lived a life that was an incomparable witness to this Choice for God - in everything, in every way. That is the only way to counter adultery any day!