Jesus’ Words on How to Love God More, 24th Thursday (II), September 17, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine
September 17, 2020
1 Cor 15:1-11, Ps 118, Lk 7:36-50

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday, we examined St. Paul’s beautiful canticle of love from his First Letter to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul described that love is patient, kind, not jealous, pompous inflated, rude, self-interested, quick-tempered, brooding, or focused on wrong-doing rather than the truth, but how it unfailingly bears, believes, hopes and endures all things. He called love the “greater spiritual gift,” the “still more excellent way,” and said that without it, speaking in human and angelic tongues, comprehending all mysteries, having faith to move mountains, giving away everything, and handing one’s body over to torturers in witness to the faith amount to nothing. That’s how important love is.
• Today in the Gospel, Jesus teaches us how to become great in love. Great in love for him and greater in love for others in spreading love of him. It’s one of the most beautiful scenes in the Gospel. Jesus is received by a leading Pharisee, Simon, into his home, but isn’t welcomed with the three typical gestures with which guests were always greeted, with an embrace on the shoulder, the washing of feet with cold water, and a pinch of incense or smell of roses on the head. Simon, it seems, not only took typical hospitality for granted but took Jesus for granted.
• A sinful woman who heard that Jesus was there, however, did not take him for granted. As Jesus lay reclining with the others at the table, she anointed his feet with oil, then washed them with her tears — think about how copious she must have been weeping! — and then dried them with her long hair. Simon’s reaction was that Jesus couldn’t have been a prophet if he didn’t realize this woman was a sinner, but Jesus in fact recognized they both were and drew an important and obvious lesson we shouldn’t miss as he prepared to forgive her sins and send her away in peace: The one who has been forgiven more, loves more. “But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” For us to love Jesus much, we need to be forgiven much.
• Pope Francis stresses this point in a book length interview before he became Pope. “For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences” the future Pope Francis said in El Jesuita. “When a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus,” Cardinal Bergoglio stated, “he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone who loves him profoundly, who gave his life for him.” Many Catholics, he said, have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience. “There are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved, … who therefore lack the experience of who they are,” he lamented. “I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”
• That’s why it’s essential for us to have this experience of our desperate need for Christ’s mercy and for us to come, like the woman in the Gospel, to weep at Jesus’ feet, conscious that, as we prayed in the Psalm, “his mercy endures forever” and that he has done everything he did to forgive us our sins. If we remain aloof, like Simon the Pharisee, we’ll never really understand who Jesus is or who we are. We’ll never understand how much we’re loved. We’ll never really learn therefore how to love according to the divine essence.
• St. Paul was able to write so beautifully about love because he had experienced God’s merciful love to its depths. At the end of today’s famous passage in the 15th Chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, which may be the earliest part of the New Testament, he wrote, “Last of all, as to one born abnormally [the Greek word means “born aborted, dead], he appeared to me. For I am the least of the Apostles, not fit to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.” He had been saved by the mercy of the Lord and he spent the rest of his life as an ambassador of mercy pleading with everyone in the Lord’s name to “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:19-20). He made preaching and sharing God’s love his life’s mission. That was the kergyma, the essential proclamation of the Good News, he always shared. He told us at the beginning of today’s passage from his first Letter to the Corinthians, that this is a message of mercy that saves. “I am reminding you, brothers and sisters, of the Gospel I preached to you, which you indeed received and in which you also stand. Through it you are also being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures; [and] that he appeared” to many. He transmitted to others what he considered the most important thing of all, all Christ himself did for the forgiveness of our sins, so that we might know the great love he has for us and rediscover who we are. But that gift itself becomes a task, for us to receive that saving reality share that saving word with others; as St. Paul wrote earlier in this letter, the love of Christ impels us to share what we ourselves have received and to do as the great priority of our life.
• Today we celebrate the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine, who experienced this love and was impelled to share it. He was one of the great figures who helped the Church get back on track  from the problems and scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. In many places Catholics had become corrupt, sinful, failing to love God and neighbor, failing to receive God’s loving mercy. Many Christians had scandalously separated from the communion of believers as a result, wounding the Church’s ability to show by its communion an image of the loving communion of persons who is God. St. Robert worked patiently, with holy perseverance, to do everything he could to heal the schism and bring people back to God and to his mercy. He guided popes. He wrote apologetic manuals. He trained priests to be part of the solution rather than the problem. He labored to help reunite those who had cut themselves off from the Church to the Sacrament of God’s mercy and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. His teaching sought to bring them back, so that they might learn how to love the Lord much. He worked on the divide that had invaded the relationship between faith and science in his famous conversations with Galileo, after an occasionally stale and hardened philosophy was almost being raised to the point of dogma. He was humble enough to learn, even as a bishop and cardinal, from the simple, like we see in his mentoring of the vocation of the young St. Aloysius Gonzaga, who taught him through his simplicity and purity how better to receive God’s love. We prayed at the beginning of Mass that God who so “adorned the Bishop Saint Robert Bellarmine with wonderful learning and virtue to vindicate the faith of your Church,” would help us to “always find joy” in the “integrity of that same faith.” Christ said that in yesterday’s Gospel that wisdom is always vindicated by her children, by God’s children, and Christ’s wisdom and power — shown most powerfully in the love of the Crucified Christ, the power and wisdom of God — was certainly vindicated in him. That’s why he is now a doctor of the Church, someone whose teachings we can follow with confidence so that God’s wisdom may be vindicated in us.
• Today at Mass, we recognize that all of us, like St. Paul, were in a sense born dead, born outside of grace because of original sin, but God has restored us in baptism and so many times in the “second baptism” of the Sacrament of Confession that restores us to our baptismal graces, where we have experienced the depth of his love, grown to appreciate it more, and been capacitated to pay it forward. We recognize we’ve been forgiven not just 500 days wages but far more. We ask him for the grace to love him in correspondence to that unbelievable gift, like St. Robert whom we celebrate today, and to spend today, tomorrow and the rest of our life, passing on to others as of the greatest importance of all what we ourselves have received and what God himself wants to give them.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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