Dear Friends,

You have probably heard the old saying, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Variations of that saying have been attributed either to Charles Caleb Colton or to Oscar Wilde. When interpreted in a positive way, the basic insight of this proverb is that the best way to honor someone is to learn from their example how to do something well.

I may be mistaken about this, but it seems to me that this saying, and the meaning behind it, is not very popular today. In our culture we tend to look down on “imitation” and we exult “authenticity.” We associate the word “imitation” with things like “imitation leather,” which gives it a sense of not being real or genuine. On the other hand, we want and expect people to be “authentic,” to be who they are, rather than someone they are not.

Because of this, something that we hear proclaimed from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians today may strike us as a bit strange. He writes that we should “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Be imitators of God? What does Paul mean? How can we “imitate” God when we are only human beings?

The fact that Paul connects the call to imitate God with our identity, in Christ, as beloved children of our heavenly Father is key to beginning to wrestle with Paul’s challenging words. The imitation we are called to live out is not an artificial or disingenuous play-acting or pretending. No! The call to imitate God is, in fact, the call to discover our true and genuine identity.

We are called to imitate God in a way similar to the way a young child will naturally and lovingly imitates a parent. Think, for example, of a young boy who “shaves” his face as he sees his dad shaving. Or think of a young girl who cradles a doll in the way she sees her mother cradling a younger sibling. There is no insincerity on the part of such children; there is only love and admiration for the parent who is modeling something of what it means to be an adult to that child.

I think reflecting on Paul’s words can help us to receive and respond to something that Jesus says in the Gospel passage we hear at Mass today. This week, as we continue to listen to Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse in Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, we hear him say to those who murmured against him, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from God comes to me.” The kind of listening to and learning from God that Jesus calls his followers to experience is not a call to passively receive data from God. Instead, by listening to our heavenly Father and learning from him we can imitate God’s very way of living and relating.

Jesus goes on to say, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.” Of course, Jesus is referring to himself, and, in so doing, helps us to recognize how we can possibly imitate the invisible God. In listening to Jesus and learning from him, we encounter the perfect image—the true reflection—of the Father.

By allowing God to draw us together on Sundays to listen to Jesus speak to us in the Scriptures and by participating in Jesus’ ongoing handing over of himself to God and to us in the sacrificial offering of the Holy Eucharist, you and I are empowered by the Holy Spirit to imitate God—to image God more fully, to become a truer reflection of his life and love—more and more. Our Eucharistic celebration is what enable us, as beloved children of God, to live in love—to “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven [us] in Christ.” The Eucharist, thus, enables us to join Christ in gratefully making of our lives “a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant offering.”

In so doing, we can discover that the sincerest form of worship we can offer to God is to allow him to teach us to imitate his life and love in our lives. We can also discover that our truest identity, the persons, and people for which God created us, is to be men and women who bear and reflect the very image of God in our world.

Peace,

Father Leo