Living, and Not Just Knowing, the Two-Fold Command of Love, 9th Thursday (II), June 4, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass in Times of War or Civil Disturbance
June 4, 2020
2 Tim 2:8-15, Ps 25, Mk 12:28-34

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

The following points were attempted during the homily: 

• Today we pray in the Psalm, “Teach me your ways, O Lord!,” and Jesus and Paul both respond to that plea. Their answers give us a lot of guidance during this Votive Mass in Time of War and Civil Disturbance, when organized mobs, using legitimate protests again racism and the killing of George Floyd are being used as cover for organized crime and diabolical destruction in the City of New York. God’s ways provide light in the midst of the darkness enveloping our city each day as dusk falls.
• The Gospel involves an honest question among the interrogation of Jesus we see in Mk 12, in anticipation of the Passion. He was asked a question about the authority by which he was cleansing the Temple, about whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, about whose wife would a woman married successively to seven brothers be in heaven, all designed to try to trip him up, get him to lose the crowds, and potentially to have a cause to persecute him unto death. Jesus transcended each of those questions. Today, a lawyer of Sacred Scripture, having heard his answers, approaches with a question designed to know the truth. It focuses on what is the most important thing we need to do, and Jesus replies, loving God with all we have and then adds a second command, similar to the first, loving our neighbor with all we have. The lawyer who asked the question responded with joy at Jesus’ answer. Jesus told him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God,” because knowing the truth and doing the truth are two different things. To enter the kingdom of God, the scribe needed concretely not just to know about the need to love God and neighbor but actually to love them. And Jesus had come to teach us the Lord’s ways and to help us learn how to follow him in loving God the Father and loving neighbor.
• This is very important for us during these days of diabolical destruction. Walking here this morning through Midtown, it was like a lumber yard with construction workers with chain saws and hammers boarding up almost every store and business that hadn’t already been boarded. That’s to try to prevent some of what I saw on Monday returning from celebrating Mass for the Sisters at St. Andrew’s, where I saw cars torched, glass all over the sidewalks, car windows and windshields demolished, graffiti everywhere, ransacked high level stores and convenience stores. I bet if we interviewed the looters, they would have all heard of the Golden Rule. They would have all heard of the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. But despite that knowledge in their minds, those words are sterile and inert in their hearts. What’s happening is exactly the opposite of love of neighbor and treating others how you would want to be treated. That similarly goes for the four officers who presided over the death of George Floyd on camera, despite his pleas and those from bystanders. It’s the further thing from love. And how did we get to this point of such bald-faced contradictions to the love of neighbor that is at the root of peace? Jesus indicates it to us. The “second” is based on, or “like,” the first. Once we fail to love God — and to love him with passion, to love him with our minds and come to know him, to love him with our hearts above over loves, to love him with our strength even when it’s hard, to love him with our soul and keep it clean, to love him with all we’ve got — then we fail to recognize him in our neighbor, we alienate ourselves from our neighbors, and then we basically begin to follow Satan’s ways rather than the Lord’s ways.
• St. Paul in the Second Letter of St. Paul to St. Timothy gives us a further aspect of the divine prescription we and our societies need to follow for healing. St. Paul gives his spiritual son what he calls, “my Gospel,” the Gospel for which he was willing to suffer so much. That Gospel is: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David.” The first part is “Remember Jesus Christ.” The great spiritual principle of the desert fathers was anamnesis, literally unforgetting. It means to remember that Christ is with us, that he reiterates his teaching in the present, that he gives us himself and his help so that we may love God with all we are and love our neighbor as Christ has loved us first. We know that if the mobs recognized Jesus Christ was with them, he would not be leading the looting. Similarly when we know that Christ is with us, then the temptation to choose Barabbas in disguise through sinning dissipates. To love God and neighbor we must first remember Jesus Christ.
• St. Paul urges Timothy to remember two things about Jesus: that he’s risen from the dead and that he’s a descendant of David, in other words, divine and human. Jesus has triumphed over death and what led to it, sin. He can lead us out of the pit of violence and destruction and dehumanization. But he’s also fully human. We have a high priest, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, who can sympathize with us in our weaknesses because he’s like us in everything but sin and he can help us to overcome hatred with love. St. Paul summons us to remember Jesus in this two-fold way not merely with our mind, but in the way we live. He summons us to enter into Christ, to persevere with him, to acknowledge him, and to turn to his mercy when we have failed. If we die with him in baptism and live by our baptismal promises — renouncing Satan, his empty words and evil works — we will live with him. If we persevere with him in loving God and neighbor, we will reign with him in his kingdom. But if we deny him, not just by outright apostasy but by choosing sin over him and persevering in sin, then he will deny us, because Jesus himself said that he will acknowledge before the Father those who acknowledge him before others. How important it is to “remind people of these things and charge them before God to stop disputing!” How important it is to help them to remember Christ, to live with him, to reign with him, and to present themselves eagerly as acceptable to God.
• The way we “remember” Jesus Christ best is here at Mass. This is his living “memorial,” his zikkaron, his anamnesis, in which he comes live into our life. He comes to teach us his ways not just by his words but by his example, calling us to follow him, through the Cross to eternal glory. He comes to give us his light so that we can become the Light of the World, needed today as much as ever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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