Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
17th Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
September 27, 2020
Eph 4:1-6, Mt 22:34-46
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided 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.” The call about which he is speaking is the vocation to follow Christ, to be holy, to live with faith according to the Holy Spirit, and to share the gift of faith as of the first importance with others. Jesus makes that calling very plain in today’s Gospel.
- A lawyer asks Jesus, “What is the greatest of all the commandments?,” and 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 soft ball, but it was really a 100 mph slider. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest was something that the scholars of the law had found difficult for centuries. 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). 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, why God 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 simple fact that we acknowledge him, revere him and have feelings of affection and gratitude toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God, because to love him means to love what and whom he loves. Jesus said 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 is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. Jesus during the Last Supper would set his love up as a model for our love. No longer would our love for ourselves be the standard for the love of our neighbor, but his love for us would be the standard: “Love one another as I have loved you!” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). When he 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. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?,” the neighbor we’re supposed to love as ourselves, 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).
- The thing many miss about Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question today is what Jesus says after giving us this two-fold directive of love. By it, he makes love for God and for others very practical and gives us the prism by which to understand not only everything he reveals to us and but also how he calls us, in practice, to love in a manner worthy of the calling we have received. I have found this one sentence to be one of the most helpful phrases in the whole Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: “On these two commandments,” Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the love of God and love of neighbor. This is so different from the way many often look at the commandments. We can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some can claim, especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality and the fifth commandment on abortion, that they violate them precisely out of love. But we need to ask ourselves, to 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 could 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 someone if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love someone if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God is a law that trains us how to love. Every violation of his commandments 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 on the pathway of true love. God out of love for us 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).
- These teachings on love of God expressed through love of neighbor are always timely, but it’s very important for us to focus on them at this time. Because of the nomination of a Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court yesterday, the Catholic faith, and Catholics in general, will be in the crosshairs of those in society and in the media who want to preserve their ability, for whatever reason, to violate the fifth commandment and kill human beings in the womb. Barrett’s faith was raised as a reason to oppose her nomination to the 7th Circuit three years ago with one prominent Senator’s saying about her that Catholic “dogma lives loudly in her,” meaning that she shows signs that she’s a faithful Catholic. We see that fidelity — and her love for God — in her participation in the People of Praise community, an ecumenical movement that helps families live in a Christian way. We see her love of others in the way she and her husband have raised a large family, including adopting to Haitian children, to give them a chance at a better life, as well as in her whole approach to the judiciary as a serve to her fellow citizens. As the Senate prepares for the hearings, the lived Catholic faith will be a fishbowl made of magnifying glass and we’ll all have to endure insults and bigotry that would never be given to a Muslim or a Jewish nominee. It will be easy, especially at the hyper-caustic time of a presidential election, to respond with an eye for an eye, an insult for an insult, and lower ourselves to the vitriol that will be directed at us. But as Christians Jesus summons us to live in a manner worthy of our Christian vocation. He calls us to love our neighbor as he has loved us first. And just as he loved those who were persecuting and even crucifying him, he summons us to love those who make themselves our enemies, to pray for our persecutors, to do good to those who don’t do good to us. These next several weeks will be those in which the light of our faith and its Christ-like love is meant to shine.
- For a practical example of what it means to live in a manner worthy of our calling, we can turn to the saint the Church celebrates every September 27th, because it was on this day 360 years ago that Jesus called Saint Vincent de Paul home to heaven, saying to him if it has ever been said to anyone, “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink, naked and you clothed me, a stranger and you welcomed me, ill and you cared for me, imprisoned and you visited me.” St. Vincent was a greater teacher of charity who practiced what he taught. “Charity,” he said, “is the life of the soul.” He added: “Charity toward one’s neighbor is an infallible sign of the true children of God.” “Charity is the cement that binds communities to God and persons to one another.” “We should … pray continually that God may grant us that spirit of compassion that is truly the spirit of God.” He would call the people of his day to conversion by asking, “What are we doing if we are not doing God’s will?,” and God’s will is for us to love one another as he has loved us. And St. Vincent strove to make charity effective. “The poor suffer less from a lack of generosity,” he stated, “than from a lack of organization,” and he organized charitable works so that people loved infinitely by God wouldn’t fall through the cracks. Through the work of Blessed Frederick Ozanam, the founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Vincent’s name has been associated with the Church’s organized charity ever since.
- Four centuries after his life, however, we can think that Vincent was always a model of Christian charity, a model of the Good Samaritan. He wasn’t1 He was self-centered, vain, and ambitious, focused more on accumulating things and living the good life than giving his stuff and himself away. His conversion to charity is something we can and should all learn from, for he even though he knew God’s teachings about love, and even though he could preach about them, at the beginning they were just words.
- Born in 1580, he was the son of poor farmers in southwestern France, the third of six children. His parents struggled simply to make ends meet, but when Vincent’s father recognized how precociously intelligent his son was, he and the family sacrificed many of their animals to provide him an education through the Franciscan Recollects and later the University of Toulouse. Vincent, however, really wasn’t appreciative. One day when his father made a long journey on foot to visit him in his tattered peasant clothing, Vincent didn’t even go out to greet him because he was so embarrassed by his dad’s poverty. Vincent’s ambition at the time was to become a priest, not fundamentally because he thought it was his vocation, but because he thought vainly that it might bring him fame and notoriety. He knew that if he played his cards right, he might receive benefices for rich Churches and abbeys that would provide him enough income to permanently get his family out of the poverty that embarrassed him so. Because of his genius and motivation, he raced through university and was ordained a priest at the shockingly young age of 19, even though canon law required one to be 25. He wasted no time vainly trying to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. He became a chaplain to Queen Margaret of Valois and moved to Paris. As a brilliant “baby priest,” he quickly earned the reputation as a talented preacher, which gained him further entrée into French high society.
- But the Lord gave him two experiences that helped him to convert from his vanity and his rejection of Christ to serve his own ego. The first happened in 1605, six years into his priesthood. After having gone to Marseilles to acquire an inheritance — another sign of where he was placing his treasure — he boarded a ship to Narbonne that was captured by African pirates who brought him to Tunis, where he was a slave for two years. We have today the plague of human trafficking, or modern slavery, and St. Vincent himself was a slave in forced labor for two years. God eventually arranged for his escape when he was able to persuade the wife of an ex-priest who had converted to Islam to preserve his own life to convert her husband, give up their illicit arrangement and head back to France. And her conversion was an occasion of his own. After his release, Vincent never forgot the misery these slaves were experiencing. He resolved to help them somehow, someway. There were about 25,000 poor slaves on the Barbary Coast, mostly Christian. He would send many priests and brothers to attend to their spiritual meets and never ceased to raise money to ransom them; by the time of his death, he had purchased the freedom of over 1,200. (Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from death in the Concentration Camps and is justly venerated. St. Vincent was a similar hero).
- The second experience was a further crucifixion of his ego and pursuit of the esteem of others. After he had returned to Paris, his roommate was robbed of 400 crowns. Convinced Vincent was the thief, he maliciously accused him to the police and to everyone else. Whereas earlier Vincent may have trusted in his own abilities to defend his reputation, now he trusted only in divine Providence, who had just freed him from slavery. “God knows the truth,” he said calmly, as he bore the calumny for six months until the true thief confessed. It cured him of the vanity of placing his treasure in human respect.
- From that point forward, St. Vincent was free to seek God’s interests in everything, and even though he would continue to walk in and out of French high society, his heart was set firmly on what the Lord wanted, on God’s glory, rather than the vanity of worldly success. He began to live in accordance with the calling he had received as a Christian and a priest. He was recruited by the powerful Count of Joigny, Philip de Gondi, to become chaplain to his family and tutor to his children. This was the assignment of the younger Vincent’s dreams, but it was now an assignment that he twice laid down in order to become a pastor in poor rural areas in great need of conversion. Both times, however, Count de Gondi — who with his family loved Vincent — prevailed upon him to return. The latter time they enticed him by promising him that one of his tasks would be to teach the Gospel to the peasants throughout their expansive territory who were in ignorance and moral disarray. Count de Gondi, who was prefect of the French penal system, also arranged for Vincent to be named almoner and chaplain to the convicts in the galleys, which allowed Vincent to bring not just spiritual but material comfort to these prisoners across France. The more work he did among the poor and the outcasts, the more he became aware of how much work needed still to be done. He knew that effective organization was essential. So he began to recruit priests to help him in the work of preaching the Gospel to the poor; these clerics, drawn by Vincent’s example, became the first members of the Congregation of the Mission. With the help of St. Louise de Marillac, he established the Daughters of Charity, to work in the many hospitals he was founding to care for the sick, incurable, orphaned, aged and abandoned. To help in the relief of the indigent, he instituted the Ladies of Charity, a group of wealthy women who would use their social connections to raise the funds needed not merely for the immediate care of the poor, but for their long-term education and training. In Paris these Ladies helped to run a soup kitchen that fed a staggering 16,000 hungry people a day. And he got involved in the formation of all the priests of France and the selection of Bishops by the state so that they might be men who similarly lived in accordance with the calling they had received and loved both God and neighbor with distinction.
- Vincent would say, “It is certain that when charity abides in a soul, it takes entire possession of all its powers; charity allows it no rest; it is an ever-growing fire.” When agape exists in a soul, it becomes like a bonfire that keeps people up at night. And that’s the fire we saw in him. That’s the same fire God wants to see in us. That’s the fire that God wants to kindle each time we receive Him, as love incarnate, in the Sacramentum Caritatis of the altar. St. Ephrem the Deacon said that whenever we receive Holy Communion, we receive “Spirit and fire.” That’s the fire that God wants to ignite in us, to help us live in a manner worthy of the vocation to charity we have all received.
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.
Toile de l’glise paroissiale de CLICHY
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