More Important Than The Elections, 31st Sunday (B), November 3, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
November 3, 2024
Deut 6:2-6, Ps 18, Heb 7:23-28, Mt 12:28-34

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today we start what will surely be a highly dramatic and historically consequential week, nearing the end of a political season that many, on various sides, have been framing in apocalyptic terms. Some are charging that what’s at stake is the end of democracy if one presidential candidate — whom they are labeling as a fascist, an insurrection inciter, and a convicted criminal — is elected. Others are saying that what’s at stake are the lives of millions in the womb and the freedom of the Church, if the most pro-abortion presidential candidate of all time — who wants women proudly to shout their abortions and prevent any medical personnel from religious or conscientious objection, and who, among other anti-Catholic words and actions, believes Knight of Columbus should be disqualified from judgeships and high government service — gains the majority of the electoral college. Both campaigns, not to mention media programs, celebrities, columnists, social media influencers, and thousands of zealous adherents, have been ramping up the fears of catastrophe if one or the other is elected. In an already anxious age, millions are understandably on edge.
• That’s why it’s especially important for us to listen carefully today to the Word of God. Right on cue, God seeks to orient us as his sons and daughters as we face a momentous week as well as to strengthen us, as salt, light, and leaven, to help guide our neighbors and fellow citizens. In today’s Gospel, a scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” In other words, “What is the most important thing I need to do?” And Jesus doesn’t say, perhaps to the surprise of some contemporary commentators, “Make sure you vote this way in the election.” Instead, he tells us something far more important, not just for life in general but even for our duties as citizens. I’d like to focus on the two most important lessons.
• The first is about the primacy of God. Jesus echoes in the Gospel something from today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. It’s a message that is fundamental not just for Israel to hear but for the United States and people of every country and time: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” In an age that seems to reduce almost everything to political messianism, in which political campaigns are trying to enlist and manipulate religious believers toward political ends, as if this election is the definitive battle between good and evil, light and darkness, life and death, with the only option to vote for one candidate or the other as a savior, the Word of God wants us to remember that there is only one Lord. As we prayed in the Psalm, he is our strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, refuge, shield, horn of salvation, stronghold and savior. The Letter to the Hebrews makes this even more explicit in reminding us that Jesus, our incarnate Lord whom we will celebrate in three weeks as King of the Universe, is our eternal high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, perfect, higher than the heavens, who remains in office forever and is always able and eager to save those who approach God the Father through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them. These words are a great consolation, on November 3rd and for November 5th, November 6th and beyond. The Good Shepherd will not leave us orphans. He has promised to be with us always until the end of time. He has triumphed over sin and death.
• These words, and the reality to which they point, are meant to become a way of life. They summon us not just to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, to trust him and to adore him, but, as he reminds us today, to love him who loved us first, and to do so with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The first of all the commandments, the most important thing we need to do in life, is to love God. It’s not enough simply to know him. It’s not sufficient to recognize that we should love and honor him. We must actually love him. Jesus told the scribe who rejoiced at Jesus’ answer to his query, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The scribe was close to the Kingdom but not yet in it, because to enter and live in the Kingdom, we must not just know that we must love, but actually love. And when we love in the way Jesus indicates, we begin to live in God’s kingdom, in the world but not of it. We become as it were the soul of the world, even in the midst of external chaos and instability. God wants to give us the peace that comes from grounding our life in the love of him who is indeed our strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, refuge, shield, horn of salvation, stronghold and savior. There is only one God and we will never find him on any electoral ballot. That’s the first truth God wants us to remember today.
• The second crucial lesson Jesus teaches is about how to relate to others at every time, including during election season. Jesus states that the second most important thing we need to do in life is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Indeed, as he would say elsewhere, the way we show our love of God is not to love him as he has loved us but to love one another as he has loved us. The word Jesus uses for love is agape, which means unconquerable benevolence. It means an orientation of life that features a willingness to sacrifice, to forgive seventy times seven times, to serve, even to die. What makes Christians distinctive, from Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount onward, is that we have agape even for those who have made themselves our mortal adversaries. We’re not necessarily going to like our enemies, or have them over for tea, or agree with them. But we are called to love them. To pray for them. To try to understand them. To strive to save them. To seek to find the good in them and help it grow. And never to give up on them.
• This reminder about the love of neighbor is pivotal in an age in which political campaigns regularly try to get us to hate our neighbors and to fear them as existential threats. One campaign has tried to get us to fear and hate immigrants, especially those who have come or are trying to come here illegally, as people intent on stealing our jobs, terrorizing our neighborhoods, trafficking our teens, and even eating our dogs. Another campaign has tried to get us to fear our own sons and daughters in the womb, to despise those who try to defend them, to deride people of faith, and to demonize and cancel those who don’t agree with their radical revolution of human anthropology and sexuality. Both sides imply that to love our neighbor, especially those of another political persuasion, would be naïve and downright dangerous. We’re in a de facto civil war, they suggest, and therefore it’s important to know our enemies, make sure others regard them as enemies, and passionately oppose them. With religious zeal, they try to convince us that the Golden Rule no longer applies; rather, we need to hate those who hate us and do unto them first the malevolent things they intend to do to us before they get the chance.
• It’s tempting, sometimes, to capitulate to this fear-mongering rhetoric, because it’s repeated almost incessantly on various television programs, talk shows, podcasts, social media scrolls and more. But as Christians, we must resist it. It’s “election interference” not by the Russians but by the Evil One himself, who always seeks to divide and to get us to turn on each other. Jesus, however, calls us to love our neighbor with the love we have for ourselves and our loved ones, with the love with which he himself loves them and loves us. That’s not a platitude but a command. This means, concretely, among other applications, that we must love Donald Trump. We must love Kamala Harris. We must love those who support them. We must love those who oppose them. Even as we work to defeat their particular ideas and candidacies. If we don’t love them as we work, perhaps vigorously against their positions, we are not living as Christians, as sons and daughters of the eternal Father. At times this summons to Christian love is not just hard but heroic. But it’s what Jesus himself did and does. It’s what the Blessed Mother did and does. It’s what the saints in every age do. Jesus’ powerful words from the Sermon on the Mount have never lost their force. Let’s listen to him with fresh ears: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?” For us to be different from the pagans, for us to enter the kingdom of God and live by its principles, we must love like God the Father loves, like God the Son loves, like the Holy Spirit has helped the saints throughout the centuries love. Even though there won’t be millions of dollars spent on commercials telling us this, it’s more important and urgent than the outcome of this Tuesday’s election.
• So, as we draw near to election day, and especially to its aftermath, the Lord is reminding us of our supreme duties as his sons and daughters. Before we give to Caesar, we’re called to give to God what belongs to God, and that means to love him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, to serve him as his loyal subjects, to live as citizens of heaven with the virtues befitting Jesus and his followers. Then, in an age of division and growing hatred, we’re called to bring those virtues to a culture that desperately needs them, no matter what outcome election day brings, and beyond.
• Then, … third, out of love for God and neighbor, we need to vote. And vote differently than the rest. We vote our faith. We vote our prayer. We vote our conscience, that inner forum in which we converse with God as he guides us in all our moral choices. We vote for candidates, platforms, ballot items, that will best enable us to love God and neighbor and form a culture that will facilitate that highest and most common good of all. There are some voices who want to convince us that there’s only one moral choice in this election, as if God himself were running, and we need to be on guard against such idolatry and political manipulation of religious believers and faith. There are, however, many moral issues that we must weigh together with God, as we exercise our responsibilities — not just on the first Tuesday after a Monday in November, but always — to help promote a culture of life and a civilization of love, and strive to form in our generation “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all,” including and especially those most vulnerable.Those looking for an endorsement from me will not get one. It’s not because I’m a coward or evasive or because I haven’t figured out for myself how to handle an election in which the major candidates both have manifest and manifold problems. But it’s because each of us needs to go before God and get his guidance as to how to exercise our freedom and responsibility best in this election, conscious that God will help us prioritize among the contrasting issues, candidates, policies, platforms and promises. Since each of us will answer for our decision on judgment day, each of us needs to go to God in prayer to ascertain the right answers now.
• To strengthen us to live and love by the standards to which he calls us, God who is love, and who has made us in his image, in love and for love, gives us himself. In his appearances 350 years ago to St Margaret Mary Alacoque, revealing his Sacred Heart to her, Jesus referred to himself in the Holy Eucharist as the “Sacrament of Love.” The Eucharist is indeed the efficacious sign of Jesus’ love, what brings his love to the world. To receive him is to receive Love incarnate. To receive him worthily is to commit to love, to offer our own body, blood, and all we are and have first to God as our “holy and acceptable sacrifice, our spiritual worship” and then, together with God, to others. This true Christian love, flowing from the infinite love of God, is what our country most needs. Loving in this way is our greatest duty not just to God but to our nation. As we now draw near to Jesus, whose priesthood never passes away, who lives forever to make intercession for us, who is holy, innocent, undefiled, sinless, higher than the heavens and yet humbly about to come to this altar and make us his dwelling place, let us ask him to give us the help he knows we need to live as he commands, to love him here with all we’ve got and to truly to love others, including those who vehemently disagree with us, as he, from the Cross, loved us to the end.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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