Loving by Christ’s Measure, As St. John Paul II and Mary Did and Teach, 23rd Thursday (II), September 12, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. John Paul II National Shrine, Washington, DC
Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society Reunion
Thursday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of the Holy Name of Mary
September 12, 2024
1 Cor 8:1-7.11-13, Ps 139, Lk 6:27-38

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes for us the high standards he has for us as his disciples and apostles. “The measure with which you measure,” he instructs us, “will be measured out to you,” and describes for us the measure to which he wants us to aspire and resolve with his grace to achieve. He calls us to be and behave as “children of the Most High,” to be merciful like God the Father, to do to others first what we would hope to receive, to give rather than seek to receive, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, to give not just our winter coats but also our shirts, to love not just those who love us but even those who have made themselves our enemies.
• This is, of course, the standard Jesus himself lived. On Good Friday, we see how he loved those who didn’t love him and blessed those who were cursing him, giving himself to the extreme and pleading to the Father to forgive his executioners, those who were mocking him, and all those whose sins were bringing about his death. When the soldiers of the High Priest or the Roman guards slapped him on one cheek, Jesus could have easily annihilated them by his divine power, but he didn’t fight back, because he loved and didn’t want to harm those who were harming him. When they bid him to carry his Cross on the road to Calvary, he resiliently kept getting up walking the metaphorical second mile. When they stripped him of his cloak, he allowed them to strip him of his tunic as well as his loincloth. In all of this, Jesus, now with a glorious scarred hand, turns and summons us, “Come, follow me!,” calling us to respond to evil with good, cursing with prayer, hatred with love. The word for love he uses is agape, which means unconquerable benevolence: that no matter what others do to us, we keep loving, we don’t descend to others’ hatred by vengeance, but seek to unite the experience to God and to respond with and like God. Jesus is telling us never to stop wishing others well, never to stop doing them good, never to stop praying for them and their conversion, and never to cease asking God to forgive them when they behave in the image of Cain rather than of God.
• This was a standard, of course, to which St. John Paul II sought to live. The most iconic scene of his papacy occurred on December 27, 1983, when he went to Rome’s Rebibbia prison to forgive in person Mehmet Ali Agca, who two-and-a-half years prior had sought to murder him in Saint Peter’s Square. This was what led to the magnanimity and virtue with which he treated even the communists who had made themselves his mortal adversaries and the enemies of the Polish people. This was what led him to treat with Christian love those who opposed the theological reforms of his papacy. And this was the demanding standard to which he, with words and witness, called all of us.
• In 1986, as he was making an apostolic pilgrimage to New Zealand, St. John Paul made clear the moral meaning of our divine filiation gratuitously bestowed on us in baptism. Basing himself on today’s Gospel, he preached to the throngs in Christchurch, “[Jesus] is the Way to the Father. … He teaches us to conduct ourselves as ‘children of our Father in Heaven.’ We do this by following the command of Jesus: ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . Be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ … Jesus puts … this challenge to you and to me. The standard that is set before us is not merely [justice,] to give to each one his due. The standard for the followers of Jesus Christ is ‘to be perfect’ as God himself is perfect. …[Christ] challenges his hearers and all of us to seek a deeper and richer justice by becoming perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, by making his justice, his mercy, his righteousness the measure and the standard of our own.”
• Fifteen years later, in his Lenten Message for 2001, he spoke directly to those who might be tempted to water down that high evangelical standard or shrink from the courageous and persevering exertion to live up to it entails. “There are Christians,” he declared, “who think they can dispense with this unceasing spiritual effort, because they do not see the urgency of standing before the truth of the Gospel. Lest their way of life be upset, they seek to take words like ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’ (Lk6:27) and render them empty and innocuous. For these people, it is extremely difficult to accept such words and to translate them into consistent patterns of behavior. They are in fact words that, if taken seriously, demand a radical conversion.” St. John Paul II, by his words and body language, calls us to that conversion and to that high standard of ordinary Christian living, which is part of the universal call to holiness. The God who, as we prayed in the Psalm, formed our inmost being, who knit us us together in our mother’s womb and wonderfully made us knows that with his help we are capable of this high measure.
• Over the last 32 years, the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society has tried to form us, through the thought of St. John Paul II, the sources that informed him and the abundant fruits that have flowed from his enormous magisterial legacy, to seek to live by the standards of the Gospel and to become salt, light, leaven to help form the vibrant moral culture without which a free society cannot be formed or sustained. That vibrant moral culture requires justice but also more than justice. It demands the type of love that Jesus today describes. In John Paul II’s apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente preparing for the great Jubilee of 2000, he stated that the “crisis of civilization must be countered by the civilization of love.” Those emerging from explicitly atheistic environments in central and eastern Europe, as well as those confronting a militant secularism in the west, are facing ultimately those want to deny the incarnation and force a practical atheism upon the public square. The remedy to that assault, John Paul II indicated, is to show that God-with-us is really still with us — and the most compelling way to do that is through the example of Christian love, which is not a quid pro quo, loving only those who love us, but something that loves others first, that forgives others like God forgives us, and that therefore communicates that God is real, that God is love, and that it is possible to live according to his image and likeness. Paul, in today’s first reading, urged the Corinthians to this higher standard of love. In the context of care for those with consciences sensitive to eating meat sacrificed to pagan idols, he stated, “Love builds up,” and said he was willing to do anything for others because he sees each one as a “brother for whom Christ died.” That’s the type of constructive love that Christ has summoned us to bring to all our milieu where, free moral choice by free choice, we build up an agapic, fraternal and familial civilization.
• That’s the type of love by which the Blessed Mother lived. Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of the Holy Name of Mary, a liturgical observance that St. John Paul II restored to the Roman Missal in 2003. When we call upon her holy name 56 times a day in the Rosary and Angelus or more — “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners” — we are beseeching her prayers so that her Son’s love may be as consequential in us as it was in her. In his beautiful exhortation on Mary as Mother of the Redeemer, St. John Paul II said that Mary was not just the first witness to God the Father’s love for the world that led him to give us his only Son, but that she embraced that love and united herself to it with a total virginal, spousal and maternal commitment. Her life, he stated, is the fruit of the ‘new’ love Jesus brought into the world via her heart and womb, the love that came to definitive maturity on Calvary when she shared in the definitive outpouring of her Son’s redeeming love. And as she there received the beloved disciple and became the spiritual mother of us all in Christ, she made a commitment to love us by that higher standard of Christian love, the type of affective and effective love she showed at Cana of Galilee, in Lepanto and like she showed 341 years ago yesterday, when she interceded for Polish King Jan Sobieski III as he, with 76,000 troops defended not just Vienna but Christian Europe from the invading Muslim Turks with 300,000 troops. It’s from Mary that young Father Karol Wojtyla learned how to love according to Christ’s demanding standard. As his future papal motto attested, he was all hers, all he had was hers, and like St. John he accepted her into the totality of his being, as he begged her each day, with the words of St. Louis de Montfort, “Praebe mihi cor tuum,” “Give me your heart,” a heart that could receive and strive to reciprocate the divine and human standard of love her Son brought into the world. John Paul II would urge us to imitate his consecration to Mary, so that we might imitate her total loving consecration to her Son.
• When Jan Sobieski triumphantly entered Vienna on this day in 1683, he invoked and revised Julius Caesar’s famous words, stating, “Veni, vidi, Deus vicit,” “I came, I saw, God conquered.” Those of us who participate in the Tertio Millennio Seminar all have a particular connection to Sobieski, because we formally begin the Seminar attending Mass in the presence of his mortal remains, interred in a beautiful sarcophagus in the crypt chapel of St. Leonard in Wawel Cathedral, where St. John Paul II celebrated his first three Masses of Thanksgiving on All Souls Day 1946. How fitting it is, and doubtless pleasing to St. John Paul II, that we would begin this Reunion the way we always begin the Seminar, with Mass: what he reiterated during the climatic final year of his papacy as the “source and summit” of the Christian life but also “the full manifestation of [Jesus’] boundless love,” “the center of the Church’s life,” the “Church’s entire spiritual wealth” and the “magnetic pole” of Christian existence. The Eucharist is the alpha and omega of the Seminar, the starting point and goal of its intense intellectual, cultural, communal, and spiritual pillars. It’s the school in which the Eucharistic Jesus not only shows us the standard of his love, but invites us into his total sacrificial giving and transforms us from within to love others as he has first loved us. John Paul told us in his exhortation for the Year of the Eucharist, “The Eucharist not only provides the interior strength needed for [our] mission, but is also —in some sense—its plan. For the Eucharist is a mode of being, which passes from Jesus into each Christian, through whose testimony it is meant to spread throughout society and culture.” The Eucharist is meant to become the Christian way of life. “All who take part in the Eucharist,” he said, must be “committed to changing their lives and making them in a certain way completely ‘Eucharistic.’” The Eucharist, he believed, is the source of the renewal of the world. “In the Eucharist,” he declared, “our God has shown love in the extreme,” overturning all those criteria of power, reciprocal justice or even conditional love “that too often govern human relations and radically affirming the criterion of service” and makes it possible, when we make our lives commentaries on the words of consecration, to be “recognized as true followers of Christ.” The “criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations [will be] judged,” he stated, will be how the Eucharist spurs us on to love by Christ’s standard.
• St. John Paul II said that every Mass he celebrated, from his initial triduum of celebrations at St. Leonard’s chapel, to those celebrated on top of canoes in the Tatras Mountains, to St. Peter’s in the Vatican, and to the National Shrine and the Mall here in the nation’s capital, was “always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth and permeates all creation.” That’s what our Mass today here does, as we celebrate a Votive Mass invoking his intercession for the continued fruit of the Tertio Millennio Seminar, for its 1,050 alumni and all those whom the Lord wants to form through it in upcoming years. As we live out the missionary phase of the Eucharistic Revival here in the United States, we remember that the Eucharist, just like the Seminar, is intrinsically missionary, as Christ calls us here to be with him so that he may send us out, to build up society in love and help it to become and stay free and virtuous. Mary, whose holy name we invoke today, whom St. John Paul II called “a woman of the Eucharist in her whole life” and “the perfect model of love toward God and neighbor” — and to whom he said the Church looks as a “model to imitate in her relationship with this most holy mystery” — wants to help us, just like she helped the first Christians after the Ascension, to live this truly Eucharistic life, which is the fulfillment of the standard to which the blessed Fruit of her womb calls us in today’s Gospel. It’s here that Jesus gives not just his cloak and tunic, not just his right and left cheeks, but all his body and blood. It’s here where the Redeemer of man daily shows us, who cannot live without love, the infinite love he has for us, reveals us fully to ourselves, makes our supreme vocation clear, and helps us to discover ourselves in the unselfish, truly Eucharistic, gift of ourselves to others. It’s here where he bids us to bring the full measure of our mind, heart, soul and strength, as he seeks to guide us in time, and through us so many others, along the everlasting way. It’s here, finally, that Mary reminds us, “Do whatever he tells you” as we commit to “do this in memory of him” in liturgy and life. It’s where we pray, as we will at the end of the Mass today, that through the Sacrament we will receive, God will “stir up in us that fire of charity

  with which Saint John Paul the Second burned ardently as he gave himself unceasingly for [Christ’s] Church.” St. John Paul II, pray of us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download