Word of the Week

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Pure: Hagnos (Gk.): meaning, “pure, clear, clean, and chaste”. It is a term that can also be translated “excitable reverence, venerable, sacred, and modest.”

Purity “is the successful integration within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being” (CCC, 2337).  By the gift given to us at Baptism and the grace of God, we have the capacity to imitate the purity of Christ (CCC, 2345). The beatitude, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt.5:7) refers to the purity of heart, body, and intellect that predisposes us to see as God sees (CCC, 2519). The pure heart of man is undivided towards God, because he has struggled against the nature of the flesh and lovingly served the Church with his intellect by “loving truth and orthodoxy of faith” (CCC, 2518). The practice of prayer and modesty sustains purity as it protects “the intimate center of the person” (CCC, 2532-33).

The Greek term hagnos can be found 8 times in the New Testament.  Paul uses the term in various contexts to his various audiences. To the Church of Corinth, he encourages them to guard against any impurity and to remain pure for their marriage to Christ (2 Cor.11:2-3). To the same Church, Paul singled out purity as the virtue from which we can begin to distinguish proper grief: godly grief as opposed to worldly grief (2 Cor.7:11). In his first epistle to Timothy, which is regarded as an instructional manual in how to engage pastoral ministry, Paul encourages Timothy to be pure of heart that he might succeed in a proper screening of priestly candidates (1 Tim.5:22). James accounts for this vision of wisdom that accompanies purity as he reminds the Christian faithful that wisdom comes through a vessel that is most clean (James 3:17). Essentially, Paul saw purity as an honorable virtue that with it accompanies moral strength and “excellence” in the Christian journey (Phil.4:8).

On this Solemnity of all saints we are reminded of the relationship that exists between holiness and purity. Ironically, the readings for us today draw out an interesting paradox of the Christian vision of purity, that we are made pure, by the blood of the lamb. Blood stains, yet Christ’s blood washes away our iniquity and removes the stain of our sin. Christ’s blood washing takes place because of the pure blood that runs through our spiritual veins. The thousands of saints that have walked before us teach us one great lesson, that this spiritual cleansing is on-going and is a daily participation in Christ’s own purity (cf. 1 Jn.3:1-3). In our contemporary age that continues to see a slide in sexual ethics, purity is the virtue that we ought to espouse towards to attain holiness and combat the appetite of the flesh.

 

“When we say ‘purity’ and ‘pure’…we indicate the opposite of dirty. ‘To dirty’ means ‘to make unclean’, ‘to pollute’. This pertains to the physical world…when we speak about purity in the moral sense, that is, about the virtue of purity, we are using an analogy according to which moral evil is compared with being dirty. Certainly, this analogy entered and came apart of the realm of ethical concepts from earliest times. Christ affirms this: ‘what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what makes a man unclean’ (Mt.15:18).”

--John Paul II

Primary Texts Consulted

• Catholic Bible. Suggested trans. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, 1997.

 

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