Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
17th Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
September 19, 2021
Eph 4:1-6, Mt 22:34-46
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Paul, in today’s passage from his Letter to the Ephesians written when he was chained to a wall in Rome, made an appeal to the Christians there and to Christians everywhere and at all times. “I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received.” Our Christian vocation, he continues, is to live with humility, gentleness, patience, love for each other, and a burning desire to preserve unity and peace within the Church, because this is the desire and work of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
- Jesus, who is humble, meek, patient, loving, peaceful and gave his life to make us one with God and with each other, makes very clear in today’s Gospel what living according to the calling we have received means. When a lawyer asks him, “What is the greatest of all the commandments?,” Jesus replies by describing for him the human being’s vocation, the single most important thing we need to do in life. If we do everything else but don’t do this, we will not have lived life well. If we do this but don’t get to everything else, we will still have passed the test of life with flying colors. We’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times that we can think that the question was a no brainer, but it was a challenge on which scribes and rabbis would debate without consensus for life. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest was something with one right answer and 612 or more wrong answers; to make a case for one was to invite criticism from potentially hundreds of angles on a question that was not academic but essential for Jewish life.
- Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Then God through Moses gave them instructions to keep hammering this reality home every day: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9). Yet, even though Jesus’ contemporaries recited this when they awoke and went to bed, even though they made a phylactery to hang it down from their hair so that it would be an emblem on their forehead, even though the put it on a scroll and installed it next to their front door, Jesus’ Jewish interrogators still hadn’t realized its supremacy, in other words, whyGod had them do all of these things. It was precisely because loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in his image by opening ourselves up to his love. The command makes clear that it’s not enough to love God only with some, half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for God with agape like he sacrificed for us.
- But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited. He knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many people would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the fact that we acknowledge him, revere him and have feelings of affection and gratitude toward him. We think we love him by the fact that we try not to betray him through sinning against him. But until our love is really tested, until a circumstance in which love for God costs us a relationship, or a job, or sleep, or a huge sacrifice even of our life, it can really remain at the level of loyal appreciation rather than deeds. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we truly love God. Since to love anyone means to love what and whom that person loves, Jesus volunteered that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ). The clear index of how we love God, he said, is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. Jesus during the Last Supper didn’t command us, “Love me as I have loved you, but “Love one another as I have loved you!” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). He wanted us to love each other by the same standard by which he laid down his life to save ours. When Jesus asked Simon Peter three times after the resurrection whether he loved him and three times Simon said he did, Jesus told him “feed my sheep,” “feed my lambs,” and “tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for the Lord would be shown in the way that he loved all those whom God has entrusted to care. When Jesus was asked elsewhere, after he called us to love our neighbor as ourselves, “Who is my neighbor?,” Jesus gave the Parable of the Good Samaritan, stressing that everyone is in our neighborhood, that we’re called to cross the street to care for others in their need, to sacrifice our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our money, time and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John, who was present when Jesus spoke the words of today’s Gospel, made the lesson clear for the members of the early Church when he said, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20-21). Our fellow New York, the Servant of God Dorothy Day, once said, with great depth, “We love the Lord to the extent that we love the person we like the least.” Jesus calls us to love even those who have made themselves our enemies.
- Jesus goes on in today’s Gospel to say that all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the two he gives, in the love of God and love of neighbor. “On these two commandments,” he says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” To live in a manner worthy of the calling we have received, to keep all God’s commandments, we simply need to love God and love others. God has given us the commandments precisely to help us do that. This is so different from the way many of us and of our contemporaries, Christian and non-Christian, look at the commandments. We regard them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some claim that they violate certain commandments — especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality, the fifth commandment on abortion, the third with regard to the Lord’s day to cook for guests, and eighth to tell white lies, and so on — precisely out of love. But we need to ask ourselves, if do a quick gloss on the Decalogue, how can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or misusing his name? How can we claim to love him if we don’t come to worship him on the day he calls his own? How can we love our parents if we dishonor them? How can we love others if we hate or kill them? How can we love our spouse if we are unfaithful? How can we truly love another if we use the person for our sexual pleasure and risk their eternal salvation? How can we love others if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love others if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God that trains us how to love. Every sin is a violation of love of God or love of neighbor. Therefore, whenever God tells us “Thou shalt not…,” the prohibition is to help us to preserve love. It is like a signpost keeping us in the lane of love. To help us love, God gave us each commandment. That’s why Jesus during the Last Supper could tell us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and later “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17). So the commandments help us to live in a manner worthy of our Christian calling. They help us to be humble, gentle, and patient. They unite us and fight against what actions divide us. They help us to live as one body, one Spirit, with one hope, one faith, according to the one baptism we have received.
- What Jesus tells us, what Paul reminds us, is very good, but the real question is, “Do we, do I, truly live this way?” The Christian life is not a philosophy we’re called to know and regurgitate but a way we’re called to follow and to invite others onto the way with us. Whether we act on these words and help others to learn how to love and live in a manner worthy of God is the most consequential thing in life. When we do, God and his saints are so happy. When we don’t, we sadden them.
- I want to focus on these thoughts because today we celebrate the 175th anniversary of the approved apparitions of Our Lady to two child farmers in LaSalette France. I am a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, where in Attleboro, there is the National Shrine of Our Lady of LaSalette, famous for its Christmas lights, but where the events of the apparitions are portrayed with the help of beautiful statues on their exquisite grounds and where the priests of Our Lady of LaSalette Fathers have exercised an important ministry of conversion for many years. I have also had the privilege to go to the Shrine of the Apparitions in the French Alps twice. What happened there on September 19, 1846? As two children — Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud — were grazing their cows on the mountainside, they came upon a woman seated on a rock sobbing. On Wednesday we celebrated the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows and ponder Mary’s tears on Calvary. Normally if we were seeing our mother crying, we would immediately spring into action to try to comfort her as needed. We need to ponder the image of our Lady bawling her eyes out with her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees, because without grasping, we won’t grasp her love, and we may not be opening ourselves fully to receive that love. Her tears initially frightened the 14-year-old girl and 11-year-old boy, but she told them not to be afraid, to come close, because she wanted to announce to them great news. That was the great news of conversion.
- The two kids had built of the stones they found as their cows were grazing a little shrine called “Paradise” and that’s close to where a Mary, radiant as a ball of fire, at first was seated, to show them that not everyone was on the way to Paradise. She lamented four practices common then that are still very common today, all of which point to the way that we don’t live in a manner worthy of our calling, loving God and loving our neighbor: Mary indicated that so many were blaspheming the name of God; missing Sunday Mass; failing to pray, and not even taking the conversion of Lent seriously. Through this apparition she was calling them, and through them all of us, to do the opposite: to use our thoughts and speech to praise God; to prioritize the great gift of her Son in the Eucharist; to become people who pray; and to repent and believe in the Gospel and live a repentant life. She wore a radiant crucifix that had two symbols on it, one a hammer and another a pair of pincers, which was a sign of the freedom that everyone has, the freedom to refuse God and hammer Jesus to the Cross by sin, or the freedom to love God and take the pincers to remove the nails. That is the choice that faces every Christian. She weeps when we choose the nail, not just because of what that meant for Jesus her Son but what that means for each of us with the hammer in our hand. She rejoices when we take out the pincers to try to remove the nails by which our sins hammered his hands and feed to the Cross. We pick up the pincers every day we love God, every time we love our neighbor, every time we commit to live with humility, gentleness, patience and communion.
- The message of Our Lady in LaSalette is one of hope, hope for conversion. Melanie and Maximin were not practicing Catholics when Mary appeared and seldom said their prayers. Their conversion led to the conversion of many others, beginning with Maximin’s father. When he was drunk and yelled at his son for speaking about this Lady so much, the 11-year-old responded that Our Lady had spoken of him. That pierced his father and he came to the place where Mary had appeared to the children, where a stream had begun to flow where Mary had sat. He drank some of the water and received a spiritual healing, to give up the booze and live off of the Living Water. He became a daily Mass goer for the rest of his life. That conversion is a sign of hope to everyone. Pope Francis said about the apparition this morning at St. Peter’s Square, “Mary’s tears make us think of Jesus’ tears over Jerusalem and of his anguish in Gethsemane: they are a reflection of Christ’s suffering for our sins and an appeal that is always contemporary, to entrust ourselves to God’s mercy.” Saint John Paul II spoke of this hope in 1996, during the 150thanniversary of the apparitions. “The message of La Salette,” he said, “was given to two young cowherds in a period of great suffering. People were scourged by famine, subjected to many injustices. Indifference or hostility toward the Gospel message worsened. As she appeared, bearing upon her breast the likeness of her crucified Son, Our Lady showed herself to be associated to the work of salvation, experiencing compassion for her children… La Salette is a message of hope, a hope sustained by the intercession of her who is the Mother of all peoples… At La Salette, Mary clearly spoke of the constancy of her prayer for the world: she will never abandon the people created in the image and likeness of God, those to whom it has been given to become children of God. May she lead to her Son all the nations of the earth.”
- Today Mary is without doubt pleased that we have come here to praise God not blaspheme, to pray with each other, to keep holy the Lord’s Day, to proclaim as we did in the Confiteor that we’re great sinners by our own most grievous fault who need her Son, the Lamb of God, to have mercy on us and grant us peace. She’s interceding for us to live in a manner worthy of our calling, to love the Lord and keep his commandments, and to love our neighbor. The greatest way we use the pincers to console Jesus on Calvary is to receive worthily Jesus’ body and blood offered for us upon the Cross, so that, from the inside, Jesus may strengthen us to live in a manner worthy of the calling we have received, following our Lady’s example, so that we, like her, may have fulfilled the one hope of our call and with her, for eternity, come to love God forever with all our mind, heart, soul and strengthen within the union of love that is the communion of saints.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians
I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them [a scholar of the law] tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus questioned them, saying, “What is your opinion about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They replied, “David’s.” He said to them, “How, then, does David, inspired by the Spirit, call him ‘lord,’ saying: “The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet”? If David calls him ‘lord,’ how can he be his son?” No one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day on did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
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