Faith Working through Love, 28th Tuesday (II), October 16, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
October 16, 2018
Gal 5:1-6, Ps 119, Lk 11:37-41

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• There seems to be a serious contradiction in today’s readings. In the Responsorial Psalm, we expressed a great love for the law of the Lord. “In your ordinances is my hope and I will keep your law continually,” we prayed, “because I seek your precepts. I will delight in your commands which I love, and I will lift up my hands to your commands and meditate on your statutes.” Yet in the first reading St. Paul implies that the law is a “yoke of slavery,” that circumcision, which featured prominently in the law, “does not count for anything,” and that those who are “trying to be justified by law” are “separated from Christ” and “fallen from grace.” In the Gospel, Jesus scandalized the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner because he didn’t undergo the elaborate hand-washing ritual that the Scribes prescribed had to be done before eating, pouring a half egg-shell’s worth of water down his folded hands from fingers to wrists, drying the water by making a fist and rubbing the other hand, only to repeat the gesture of another half egg-shell of water poured from wrists to finger tips. Jesus replied by calling the Pharisees “fools.” What is it? Is the law our hope, delight, and meditation or is it worthless and foolish?
• This leads us to two central truths that need to be grasped in our faith. The first is the purpose of the law of God. As Jesus would say elsewhere in the Gospel, the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs on the two-fold command to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor. The second is that, on occasion in salvation history, some began to look at the law not within this lens of helping us to love God and others, but as an end in itself, almost even an idol. People, like the Scribes and the Pharisees Jesus confronts and the Judaizers against whom St. Paul battles, began to focus more on the law than on the Legislator and those made in his image and likeness. Over time they began to create a system of interpretations and “fences” around the law (to try to prevent someone from even getting close to breaking it) that often directly opposed love of God and neighbor. We see this often in the Gospel when Jesus is accused of doing evil because he healed people on the Sabbath day, as if the only day we couldn’t love our sick neighbors was on the day of the Lord. The harmony that flows out of the apparent contradiction in today’s readings is that we are called to hope, seek, delight in, love, meditate upon and keep the law of the Lord continuously, but what God means by this is his law of love for God and for all those God loved enough to take on our human nature and die before. Some aspects of the law, like St. Paul described for us last week, were a “tutor” that meant to train us out of our fallen nature and love God and neighbor in little things, preparing us to accept what Jesus himself would come to teach as a fulfillment of that preparation. The law of circumcision, for example, consecrated human generation to God’s plans so that men and women would not forget that human love was meant to be part of the Covenant, but the physical act of consecration was surpassed in the new Covenant by the spiritual dedication: a circumcised heart was far more important than the snipping of foreskins (Deut 10:16; Deut 30:6; Jer 4:4). The dietary laws were likewise meant to consecrate one’s appetite for food to God’s plan, to train them to recognize that it was God who gave animals life (and hence the need to drain them of blood, which symbolizes life) and therefore that they should be slaughtered with a sense of gratitude to God and reverence for the way he has provided, so that even human instinctual behavior would be put into relation to God. After this period of training, Jesus and others would be able to carry out that consecration not by the physical draining of blood or the avoidance of certain animals but spiritually.
• The goal of the pedagogy of salvation history, of meditating on the law of the Lord, is to see that the law seeks to bring us to what St. Paul says at the end of today’s first reading as “faith working through love,” to a trust in God, to a receptivity to all his gifts, that overflows in deeds of love for God and others. Jesus makes the same point at the end of the Gospel when he says, “As to what is within, give alms, and behold everything will be clean for you.” God wants to bring us to a living faith that is operative in love. St. James will tell us in his epistle that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). True Christian faith is shown by the way it leads us to try to love like God loves, to the way it makes us patient and kind and all the other attributes St. Paul describes in his Canticle of Love (1 Cor 13), to the way it helps us to sacrifice for God and our brothers and sisters, even to the point of laying down our lives for them. We clean our insides not by rituals of egg-shells of water but by self-giving love, which when done from the heart rather is a great spiritual detergent. Today is a day on which the Lord is calling us to ponder whether our faith bears fruit in generous giving of ourselves and what we have to others, whether our faith leads us to “work” for God and others with loving affection.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint whose life, like that of all the saints, is a commentary on the way faith overflows through love such that one becomes an alms to God and others. She was trained in love in the school of the Cross. After the death of her father when she was a young girl, she and her mother were abused by in-laws. She suffered because of an ulcer on her leg for five years. She suffered from opposition to her vocation. She suffered from various Visitation nuns inside the convent. But she clung to Jesus on the Cross and Jesus chose her to be his instrument to reveal to us the love of his Sacred Heart. In a series of apparitions, Jesus told St. Margaret Mary that he had exhausted himself out of love for us, but from “most” he received only indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn toward his presence in what he called the “sacrament of love,” the Eucharist. He said he was particularly pained that those consecrated to him treated him in this way.  In response to “most” treating him in the “sacrament of love” with indifference by missing Mass as if it makes no difference, Jesus wants us to make him wants us to treat him in the Mass as the greatest difference-maker in our life, as our true priority, as the “source and summit” of our existence, the fulcrum of our week and day. In response to “most” who treat him with irreverence, who just go through the motions or who even pray Mass poorly as if it doesn’t matter, he wants us to treat him with deep piety. In contrast to “most” who relate to him with coldness and lack of enthusiasm, who come to Mass as bored and distracted spectators rather than ardent participants, he wants us more passionate about him at the Mass than the most fanatical sports fans are during a successful playoff run. Instead of treating him with scorn, he wants us to relate to him with grateful appreciation. And rather than receiving him sacrilegiously, without being in the state of grace, he wants us to receive him with souls fully intent on holiness and cleansed of sin. Those of us, moreover, who are consecrated to him have, in a sense, a duty to make reparation for all of those who treat Jesus poorly. If he feels most keenly the lack of love from those who are consecrated, then how much more consoling will be the love of those who are conscious of their special dedication. The best way we train to do so is by receiving Jesus in the Eucharist with precedence, piety, passion, praise and purity — in short, by treating him as he deserves. Every Eucharist, every celebration of the sacrament of his love, we receive Jesus’ own heart as he seeks to transform us so that our who lives may be an alms and an expression of faith working through love.
• Jesus wants to give us all the help he knows we need to love God and others as we should. He wants to imprint his law of love on our hearts so that in following the law, we will be doing something connatural, full of faith. Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to take St. John’s place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on his heart and, not only sense his love, but share in it. She felt the Lord take her heart, put it within his own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast, so that her heart, like his, might become a “burning furnace of charity.” Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on his as he celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from him his own heart so that we might love God and others as he loves us. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God had prophesied, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:24). He said he would do this first by “sprinkling clean water” upon us to “cleanse [us] from all [our] uncleanness” (v. 25), which is what happens in the sacrament of baptism. The Sacraments are how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!”
• Today we have come together to meditate upon and delight in the true law of the Lord, which is this law of faith working through love. Jesus comes to help us to cleanse our insides inspiring us to follow his Eucharistic example, giving our body and our blood out of love for God and alms for others, so that our insides will be made clean and one day we’ll have a chance, by God’s mercy, to enter into friendship with St. Margaret Mary and all the saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were: