Loving the Lord and Others With All We’ve Got, 3rd Friday of Lent, March 24, 2017

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Third Week of Lent
March 24, 2017
Hos 14:2-10, Ps 81, Mk 12:28-34

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

The following points were considered: 

• On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, God made a special appeal to each of us through the Prophet Joel: “Return to me with your whole heart.” He asked us to “rend our hearts,” to rip them open to receive his mercy and to share his compassion with others, a summons that is particularly relevant for us as we begin “24 Hours for the Lord” in union with Pope Francis and the whole Church.
• God’s merciful love can influence the way we read today’s Gospel for the first day of the second half of Lent. When asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus responds, “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,  with all your soul,  with all your mind,  and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” Today Jesus reminds us that the whole point of the Lenten season, the whole point of the Christian life to which Lent is meant to restore us, the whole purpose of this extraordinary Jubilee, is to return with our whole heart in love to God, and not just our heart, but to return to him with our whole soul, mind and strength as well, to receive his mercy without any obstacles and then to learn how to let that mercy we’ve received become the way which we respond to others.
• It’s important that we truly confront what Jesus is asking of us. There are many Christians who believe they love the Lord simply because they have good thoughts about God, they admire him, they think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently, the good of the other for the other’s sake. Love is opting as a habit to sacrifice oneself for another, putting someone else ahead of us, like Jesus would say during the Last Supper and put into action the following afternoon: laying down one’s life for one’s friends, in little ways or supremely. There are many Christians who love God to the point of sacrificing for him, but as today’s Gospel shows us, it’s not enough to sacrifice some of the time, financial resources and talents that he’s given us for him and his glory. It’s not enough to give God some of their mind, heart, soul and strength. Jesus is calling us to love God with all we’ve got. Today he says that that’s worth more than all sacrifices. To get to that type of love requires a deep conversion on our part. It means that our hope is not just to be good people but to be really holy people.
• We should make this practical.
  • Jesus calls us to love him with all our mind. How much of our mind do we dedicate to God? Do we try to think as God thinks in our decisions? Do we truly fill our minds with his thoughts through prayer and reading the Bible and good spiritual books or do we fill them with the world’s thoughts through reading the paper more than the Bible and surfing the internet or watching television more than we pray?
  • Jesus likewise calls us to love him with all our heart. Do we really love God more than we love everything and everyone else in our life? Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel that we’re not fit to be his disciple unless we love him more than our family members, more than our stuff, more than even our own life. This is obviously challenging but do we try to love him with all our heart?
  • He calls us to love him with all our strength. How much effort do we make to love him? Do we battle through distractions in prayer? Do we prioritize Mass and adoration and really strive to pay attention?
  • He calls us to love him with all our soul. That means he wants us full of grace. Do we seek to stay free of all sin or do we compromise with sin and give in to gossip, complaining, holding grudges and the like? Do we take advantage of the opportunities for the Sacrament of Confession so that whatever in our soul is not of God can be forgiven? Do we have plans to receive his mercy on this day of the 24 Hours for the Lord, when Pope Francis has essentially opened up a world-wide confessional?
• In the Gospel today, however, Jesus goes a step further that that challenge. He tells us that our love for God will be shown in our love for neighbor. Jesus elsewhere does say not “Love me as I love you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you.” When he asked St. Peter after the Resurrection, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” and Peter replied that he did, Jesus didn’t say, “Great! That’s all I wanted!” Rather he said, “Feed my sheep. … Feed my lambs. … Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for Jesus, just like ours, would be shown in our love for others. That means today that Jesus is calling us to love our neighbor, to love the other people in this chapel, to love our family members, to love strangers and even enemies with all our heart, all our mind, all our souls and all our strength. We begin by seeking to love others with our minds and think good things about them, noticing their good points rather than their weaknesses, giving them the benefit of the doubt rather than thinking the worst. We love them with our heart, which means with affection, including those who are difficult to love, and making the effort to care for the wounds of their heart. We love them with our strength, including when it requires summoning the strength to forgive them and making the effort to help them with deeds. And we love them with our soul, caring in a special way for their souls as well, that they be full of God.
• To paraphrase the end of the passage of the Prophet Hosea in today’s first reading, this is the “straight path” that the Lord wants us to take. This is the path that those who are “just,” who are in a right relationship with God, take. As demanding as the path is, the Lord calls us to it because he knows that this is the path of happiness. Someone who is loving the Lord with all he has and loving neighbor is the one who is really filled with joy and peace and Jesus wants us to have that joy. St. Therese Lisieux once famously said that we cannot become half a saint. That there’s no way to become holy and eternally happy giving God fifty percent. We need to give him everything. That’s the type of restoration that Lent seeks to bring about in us.
• I’d like to finish with two important thoughts on this theme. How can we actually love God and others with everything we are and have? Is God calling us to something impossible? Is it even possible to command us to love; can love be forced? The answer to these questions was given to us in the Opening Prayer of today’s Mass when we turned to God and said, “Pour your grace into our hearts, we pray, O Lord, that we may … obey by your own gift the heavenly teaching you give us.” God gives us his own love to make this type of love possible. Pope Benedict spoke about this in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, the twelfth anniversary of whose publication the Church celebrated last week with a conference in the Vatican. He wrote, “The ‘commandment’ of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given. … on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter that has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. … Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love.”
• The second consideration is about God’s merciful love, his hesed, a word that can be translated “mercy,” “love” and “goodness.” When we love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, what that means fundamentally is that we open ourselves up to his mercy, to who he is and what he wants to do for us and in us, and that is to make us holy as he is holy, perfect as he is perfect, merciful as he is merciful. He wants us to open our mind to his mercy, our heart to his mercy, our soul to be forgiven by his mercy, and our strength to persevere in seeking and receiving that mercy. And then he wants us to love our neighbor not just by imitating God’s mercy, but by loving our neighbor precisely with God’s mercy. That’s what Jesus calls us to do this year, because he desires mercy, not sacrifice!
• The great way we grow in the love of God with all we are and have and the love of neighbor with all we are and have is through the Mass. Here at Mass God “pour[s] [his] grace into our hearts, … that we may … obey by [his] own gift the heavenly teaching” he gives us. God the Father gives us his mercy, he gives us his help, he plants within us Jesus, the Incarnate Love of the Father, so that we may receive the Father’s love, incarnate in Jesus, love the Father in communion with Jesus and love others with the very love of Jesus. Today let’s ask Jesus to help us to pray this Mass with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to be strengthened by Jesus in the Mass to “do this in memory of” him, giving our bodies, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our mind, heart, soul and strength in mercy for the good of others as Jesus has given all he had for us and our salvation. Praised be Jesus Christ!

The readings for today’s Mass were: