Have you noticed how, after years of being together, some married couples actually begin to resemble one another? It's not that they necessarily look alike, but they have gradually conformed to one another — or, better said, they have engaged in a process of mutual co-formation. The same happens to good friends.

We see the shadow side of this phenomenon when "trendsetters" set standards for dress, vocabulary or behavior. We humans are natural mimics — we assume the gestures actions and attitudes of those we admire.

No wonder our creator instructed Moses to tell the Israelites, "Be holy, for I am holy." If we are going to mimic, we can't go wrong with God as our model. That is, unless we misinterpret divine holiness. Our image of God will determine not only our concept of holiness, but also our sense of justice and of what it means to love and live a good life.

As today's Scriptures explore sanctity, what is surprising is that while speaking of holiness, they hardly mention prayer or sacrifice. They emphasize relationships.

Our selection from Leviticus describes holiness as an attitude of heart. It tells us that we encounter holiness in people who have learned to free themselves from attitudes that reject and judge others.

It's not that we have to agree with what another says or does; rather, we need to avoid responding to wickedness by mirroring it with anger or grudges, or even the hope that God will wreak vengeance on evildoers. No, as the psalm says, God is kind and merciful, never cherishing the memory of our wrongdoing.

This leads us to the Gospel, a continuation of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Now we hear one of the most dangerously misinterpreted teachings of the entire New Testament. Where our translation says, "Offer no resistance to one who is evil," theologian Walter Wink tells us that the original says something more like, "Do not counter evil in kind." That actually restates the Leviticus injunction that although we may need to reprove others, we should not incur sin because of them.

In case that was not clear enough, Jesus unfurled his ironic sense of humor to offer practical examples that have been misinterpreted for centuries.

His teaching about turning the other cheek is quite specific. According to Matthew, Jesus said, if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other. Far from a call to succumb to abuse, Jesus is talking to a right-handed society in which the only way to strike a person on the right cheek was a backhanded slap — a gesture that's more demeaning than physically harmful.

Jesus was really saying, "Don't let anyone slap you as if you were beneath them. Turn the other cheek to say, I am your equal and more because I will not lower myself to your standard."

The other two examples follow suit. The only person who would go to law over a tunic was a lender whose client was so poor that he/she had nothing except their outer garment to offer as collateral. Although Exodus 22:25-25 demands that the lender return the tunic at night because it served as the poor person's blanket, the wealthy could call for a judgment against the debtor. Then, the debtor without recourse could do no more than strip off his/her inner garment (read underwear), to show the world how a justice system leaves the poor naked while awarding the rich what they don't need.

Finally, Roman soldiers could force citizens of an occupied country carry their pack for exactly 1 mile and no more. When the conscript offers to carry it further, the bully finds himself in the embarrassing position of pleading that the favor not be done, lest he be severely punished for abuse.

Each of these describes a clever way to love the enemy. Instead of fighting back on evil's terms, Jesus called his followers to maintain their dignity in the face of injustice and invite their oppressors to become more human. Blessed are we to have seen examples of such love in people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Jesus ended this part of his preaching saying, "Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect." That restates God's word through Moses, "Be holy, for I your God am holy." With this, we get a glimpse of how God's holiness in action is both creative and redemptive.

Jesus' examples of relational holiness came from his day-to-day experience. Our challenge is to imitate their cleverness in our own time and circumstances.

Such creative holiness in action does not come to us naturally. First, we must continually contemplate his ways so that we can gradually conform to his example. Then, with the help of his Spirit, we too can learn to practice creative love of our enemies.

"It's up to you." When you hear that, do you believe it's true? Advertisers hawk phrases like this to imply that the "right choice" is available for a price you can't afford to pass up. When my mother would say "It's up to you," the consequences for making the wrong choice were predictably unpleasant.

How much freedom do we really have? That's the question of today's readings.

Almost 200 years before Christ, Yeshua, the author of Book of Sirach, responded to this question in a collection of the best wisdom and religious advice he could gather. In today's first reading, Yeshua asserts that human beings are free to choose life or loss. He wanted to liberate people from the idea that their lives were predetermined or controlled by fate.

Belief in fate or freedom generates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless your name is Sisyphus, most people who feel controlled by the fates will not struggle against them.

Meanwhile, people who believe they have free will usually opt to choose how to deal with all that happens, no matter their degree of control over their circumstances.

While today's psalm promotes the idea that adherence to God's law is the way of wisdom, Paul's letter to the Corinthians offers an interesting twist on this idea. Paul calls the Corinthians' attention to a different sort of wisdom. According to Paul, mature Christians have learned the mysterious wisdom of the cross: an apparent failure that ushers in blessing beyond measure.

Paul is operating in the paradoxical realm of Gospel living. For him, real wisdom leads people to admit and accept the fact that they understand only the slightest sliver of the truth. In Paul's way of thinking, the people who are animated by the Spirit are wise enough to trust that neither their eyes nor ears, nor even heart can comprehend what has been begun in them and will be completed by God.

Under Paul's guidance, we might read today's Gospel not as a sermon, but as a revelation of Jesus' own consciousness and wisdom.

The interpretive key to everything Jesus wanted to say is encapsulated in the phrase, "I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill." Jesus, the prophetic Jewish preacher, understood that his vocation was to demonstrate the deep meaning of everything that had gone before him, particularly of God's loving interaction with humanity.

In an oppressed society hoping for military victories, Jesus preached radical nonviolence.

In a religious tradition that cherished sacrifice as humans' best offering to God, Jesus taught that interpersonal reconciliation was worth more than any material offering.

In a patriarchal and slave-holding society, Jesus preached that looking on another as an object for self-gratification rather than as an equal subject before God was tantamount to adultery. (Remember, adultery was the most common description of Israel's religious unfaithfulness and it was more a question of the unfaithfulness of idolatry than anything sexual.)

In a society that valued physical integrity and saw disability as a sign of God's disfavor, Jesus claimed that being maimed or blind was preferable to denigrating another in thought or action. (Some early Christian fundamentalists took his hyperbole to heart and maimed themselves — completely missing Jesus' sense of humor and hyperbole.)

Any one of Jesus' phrases summarizes his whole teaching, yet the simplest and clearest is "Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes' and your 'No' mean 'No.' " Who could ask for a more straightforward call to the never-ending task of living with integrity? When we describe Jesus with words like holy, wondrous, loving and faithful, each of those describes a dimension of his integrity as son of God and son of man, as the person who fulfilled the human vocation to be an image of God.

As he preached the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus revealed his own discernment about the purpose of life and the place of law. Jesus had realized that anger, resentment, the use of others for personal pleasure or gain, and the easy severing of relationships were nothing more than diverse expressions of profound disrespect for the other.

Jesus preached, not to burden others, but to invite them into profound freedom. Today, he would surely remind us that relishing anger or grudges — even at injustice — confines us in self-made mental/emotional prisons and implicitly reveals that we consider our opinion of others as infallible. Jesus' warning against lust applies also to racism, sexism, and all the bigotries that assume that our way is the norm while others are deviants.

Today's Scriptures invite us to lay claim to the freedom to live in love. We cannot control others, but we can choose how to respond to them. In baptism and every celebration of the Eucharist we say yes to Christ's way. Let our yes be yes!