Loving With All We’ve Got, 9th Thursday (I), June 3, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions
June 3, 2021
1 Tob 6:10-11.7:1.9-17.8:4-9, Ps 128, Mk 12:28-34

To listen to a recording of this morning’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Over the last three days all of the major groups of Jewish society had come to Jesus to test him, and even trap him, with tough questions. On Tuesday, the strict Pharisees and lax Herodians conspired to try to trip Jesus up on the question of whether it was lawful to pay the census tax. Yesterday, the elitist Sadducees came to get him on the question of the Resurrection of the dead. Today the last of the major groups, the Scribes, came up to him to ask him which was the greatest of all the commandments. After Jesus’ answer today, St. Mark tells us, “No one dared to ask him any more questions.”
• We’ve heard the answer to today’s question so many times that its difficulty is not always obvious. There were 613 commandments in the Old Covenant. To ask which of them was the greatest was required not only great familiarity with all of Sacred Scripture — something that the scribes had and very few others had — but also great synthesis to discover what in the Old Covenant had the greatest weight of all. As we see throughout the Gospels, the Scribes, Pharisees and many others didn’t have a great sense of the hierarchy of truths, about prioritizing what was most important of all. They often focused far more on how they’d wash their hands, pots and jugs than how to love their neighbor, straining out gnats, to use Jesus’ image that we’ll be hearing about in the next few weeks beginning Monday with the Sermon on the Mount, than avoiding swallowing camels. Jesus, however, answered the question about the most important thing we need to do and then offered a second, which is allied to it, in such a way that the scribe who had asked the question was truly impressed. For us, today, we need to ponder Jesus’ response and what that means in our life.
• The first and the greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” It was to love the Lord not only with part of ourselves, but all of ourselves. So often we can think everything is fine if, basically, we love the Lord with “most” of our heart, with “some of our mind,” with a “little of our strength,” and with the “majority of our soul.” But Jesus wants everything. And deserves everything. But how can Jesus command us to love? Can anyone be compelled to love or forced to love from the outside? Isn’t that inconsistent with what love is? It would be impossible to command to love if love were just a feeling, because we can’t be commanded to feel something. But love is fundamentally a choice, it’s an act of willing, it’s something in which our freedom is engaged. Jesus can command us to love God with all we are because God gives us himself to help us precisely to love to that degree. He commands and at the same time makes fulfilling the command possible. Pope Benedict took up this question in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, saying, “love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given.”
• And to keep that commandment to love God with all we are, we need to let that love overflow into two other forms of love, the authentic love of ourselves and the love of our neighbor as we authentically love ourselves. If we love God and God loves us, then we must love ourselves as God loves us, helped of course by God’s own love. Jesus insists in his Last Supper discourse that the Father loves us and that he himself loves us just as the Father loves him. This truth must sink deeply. And as we begin to love ourselves and will obviously the best for ourselves, we begin to love our neighbor and want their good with the heart of God, because God himself loves him or her and we share his love. Love of God, love of ourselves, and love of neighbor are, therefore, all similar because they’re all basically interconnected.
• How do we learn to love God, ourselves and others with all our mind, heart, soul and strength? The great analogy to the agapic love of God is the truly holy erotic love between a husband and a wife. We see a glimpse of that in the first reading today in the love of Tobias and Sarah on the night of their wedding. I often give this passage to couples during their marriage preparation and ask them to pray it with similar faith as they prepare to become one flesh for the first time on their wedding night and I’ve been pleased at how many of them have told me afterward that they continue to pray it regularly before they go to bed together. After praising and thanking God for the gift of marriage in his plan, Tobias prays, “Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her and allow us to live together to a happy old age.” Tobias was not approaching Sarah out of lust, with a desire of the flesh, with a desire to use her for pleasure, to take from her what would satisfy him, but for a noble purpose, accepting her within the love of God and joining with her to fulfill the noble purpose of their lives, their faith, and their marriage. He asked God to pour down on them his merciful love (hesed) so that they would be capable of this love, this noble purpose, for many years. He was loving her in God with all the heart, mind, soul and strength he could muster, and Sarah was reciprocating that love. As St. John Paul II used to remind us, authentic human love is an analogy of the type of covenant of love God wants to have with us. In true eros among the pure in heart, loving with all we’ve got is very easy. We all see it, or have experienced it, when we genuinely fall in and remain in love with another. We love with our mind, thinking about the other constantly. We love with our strength, willing to do anything to help the other heroically when the other needs it. We love with our soul, wanting the best for the other’s soul. And we love with all our heart, pouring out great affection. Both the love of friendship (philia) and authentically Christian love (agape) both needs to be affectionate, coming from the heart. Our chastity helps us to love from the heart purely, because we love others with the reverent affection with which we love God. And the Holy Spirit to whom we turn in a special way during these days after Pentecost helps us to unite “ignis” with “caritas,” as we sing in the Veni Creator, to combine fire and charity, so that our love is truly from the heart.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of those whose loved God and others with all their heart, mind, soul and strength. Jesus said no one has any greater love than to lay down his life for his friends and the 22 Ugandan martyrs — who all died between the ages of 14 to 25, from a few days to a few years from the time the love of God and flame of faith was first ignited in them by conversion and baptism — laid down their lives in faithful friendship toward God and toward each other. Their story, as Saint Paul VI said at their canonization in 1964, is every bit as moving as that of the heroic martyrs of the early Church, because they were martyrs soon after having becoming Christians. When the White Fathers arrived in Buganda, the southern part of what is now Uganda, in 1879, they found the local King Mtesa hospitable to outside influence in the hope of improving his personal and national situation. Mtesa had already welcomed in Anglican missionaries a few years earlier. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, he even allowed the missionaries to evangelize the members of his court. One of his young pages was Mkasa Balikuddembe, who rose in prominence at the palace after he courageously saved Prince Mwanga’s life by capturing and killing with his bare hands a venomous snake threatening him. For 3 years, Mkasa received a very thorough catechumenate at the palace from the White Fathers before being baptized in 1882 with the name of Joseph. After the White Fathers needed to go into exile for a couple of years because the dying king feared outside influences, Joseph Mkasa became the de facto catechist for the converts and hundreds of catechumens. When the priests returned after Mtesa’s death in 1884, they saw that Joseph Mkasa had helped the new converts bring family members to the Lord, renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices against the Gospel, and dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need. Once Prince Mwanga had succeeded his father, Joseph Mkasa became his majordomo, the top assistant in charge of the king’s palace and court. To be head of the pages, Joseph appointed a young catechumen, Lwanga. What both men soon discovered, however, was that King Mwanga was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company. Through various means, Joseph and Lwanga successfully and repeatedly conspired to thwart the king’s designs, but the king grew increasingly frustrated. After King Mwanga had had an Anglican missionary bishop murdered, Joseph went into his presence and reproved him for the murder as well as for his perverse attraction to the boys in his service. Even though it was technically the majordomo’s traditional responsibility to correct the king, Mwanga would have nothing of it. His anger boiled against Joseph and his fellow Christians whom he knew were training the boys to resist his advances. Under the pretext of Joseph’s disloyalty for putting the commands of another king, “The God of the Christians,” over his own, King Mwanga sentenced him to be burned alive. To the executioner who was having trouble carrying out his orders against the majordomo, Joseph said, “A Christian who gives his life for God has no reason to fear death. Tell Mwanga that he has condemned me unjustly, but I forgive him with all my heart.” After that, the executioner took it upon himself to behead Joseph and burn his body rather than have him burned alive. The day of Joseph’s martyrdom, Lwanga and the other catechumens among the pages were baptized. King Mwanga had made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court and they wanted to make sure that they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit before they were baptized in blood. Lwanga took the Christian name Charles. Several months later, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice, between God and him, between prayer and the predator, between life and death. “Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side,” he said, waving to his right, and “those who pray” he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and a group of 26 Christian pages, 16 Catholics and 10 Anglicans, headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. “Until death!,” they replied. “Then put them to death!,” Mwanga responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away. They began the death march, which they turned into a religious procession with hymns, prayers and expressions of joy. This was in the sharpest contracted to the brutality of their “chaperones,” who beat them so fiercely that three of them died along the way. Once in Namugongo, they were forced to watch for days as the pyre awaiting them grew and became increasingly intense. The executioners decided to kill Charles Lwanga first, in the hope that after his death, others might abandon the faith. To increase his sufferings, he was placed in a reed mat and fire was set first to his feet first so that these would be charred to the bone before the flames would reach the other parts of his body. In the midst of his suffering, Charles said to his executioner, “You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body,” a reference to the sweet solace of his baptism, the foretaste of his imminent new birth. After he was dead, the others remained steadfast and entered the pyre. One young page said to a priest present who was mourning the death of so many young Christians, “Why be sad? What I suffer now is little compared with the eternal happiness you have taught me to look forward to!” They died on June 3, which was fittingly Ascension Thursday. It’s no surprise that, on the foundation of their heroic faith, the Church has continued to grow in Uganda. Even though Christianity was less than a decade old in their kingdom, they had already gotten what it was about, and they were willing to die rather than to sin, to be killed rather than to allow sinful predation to happen to the young and innocent, to be burned alive rather than to betray the faith in the least in order to keep their lives. They were loving God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and were loving neighbor enough to risk their lives to protect them from sordid lust.
• We can ponder all of Jesus’ teachings on love within a Eucharistic key. At the beginning of the Last Supper, St. John tells us that Jesus, “having loved those who were his own in the world, loved them to the end.” He loved us, literally, to the “extreme,” to the limits of his human heart, mind, soul and strength. He places his own love within us so that, united with Him, we might love the Father as He loves the Father, so that we might love ourselves as he loves us, so that in tandem with him we might love our neighbors by Jesus’ own standard. He can command us to love God, ourselves and others because He himself loves with us from within us by this Holy Communion. And there’s also a nuptial dimension to this love. The early Christians, once Christianity was legalized and they could build houses of worship, used to cover the altars in the ancient basilicas with baldachins or canopies much like the famous one over the main altar in the Basilica of St. Peter. This canopy symbolized the chuppah, the canopy under which a Jewish husband and wife would exchange their consent and then, a year or two later when they would begin their spousal cohabitation after the husband had earned the money for their eight day celebration and joint living together, they would consummate their marriage under the same chuppah, which was a sign of doing both and everything in their marriage under the shadow of God’s merciful and loving blessing. Such a baldachin was placed over the altars to symbolize that the altar was meant to be the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church. What happens on a marriage bed? The bride takes the body of her husband within her, they become one flesh, and are capacitated by God to “make love” and “bear fruit” that can be named and baptized. What happens on the altar, the marriage bed where the union between Christ and the Church is consummated? We, the Bride of the Church, take within ourselves the Body and Blood of Bridegroom, we become one flesh with him, and are made capable of bearing fruit with him from that loving union. We’re made capable of loving God, ourselves and others, with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. This is the res mirabilis, the mind-blowing reality, that the Church in some parts of the world celebrates today on Corpus Christi, a pauper servus et humilis, a poor and humble servant, manducat Dominum, not only eats the Lord but becomes one flesh in a spousal covenant with Him. In the Lauda Sion Salvatorem Sequence written likewise by St. Thomas, we pray, “Quantum potes, tantum aude,” “Dare to do all you can” in praising God for this gift, because all of it will fall short. And in the words of St. Thomas’ Adoro Te Devote, in response to Jesus’ loving us to the extreme, we pray, “Fac me tibi semper magis credere, in te spem habere, te diligere,”  “Make me more and more believe in you, hope in you and love you!” 
• Today we come to receive him not with lust, not for our own needs and desires, but for a noble purpose, the purpose of our fruitful, loving union with him in this world and forever. And like Tobias and Sarah on their wedding night, we praise and thank God, we beg him to shower on us his mercy, and we say, “Amen! Amen!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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