Noble Spousal Love for the Eucharistic Jesus, Ninth Thursday (I), June 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist
Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon
Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR
Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival
June 8, 2023
Tob 6:10-11,7:1.9-17, 8:4-9, Ps 128, Mk 12:28-34

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

The following text guided 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 Sadducees came to try 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 and very few others had — but also great synthesis to discover what in the Old Covenant had the greatest weight of all. It was also a very risky question, because an answer might be taken to imply that 612 things that God himself had commanded were not as important as something else. We see throughout the Gospels that 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, while 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 in general, and about our approach to him in the Holy Eucharist in particular.
• 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. When God first gave this commandment to the Israelites through Moses in Deuteronomy 6, he added, “Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children. Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest. Bind them at your wrist as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.” Many Jews still today take these commands seriously. They pray them with their children several times a day. They wear tefillin and phylacteries containing this passage on their head and on their wrists. They have Mezuzahs with the passage at their doors, and even Jewish hotels have them at the entrance to each room. While Jesus himself never requires such external signs, he wanted us interiorly to have love for God in our heart, in our mind, in our arms, and in all soul and all our inmost interior.
• 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 with the love of God, we begin to love our neighbor with the love of God, too, because God himself loves them 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. The foremost image of God in the world is marriage and the family. God who is love, in creating the human person in his image, created not a him or a her, but in the image of God “created them,” whose interpersonal love open to knew life best reflects in the world the loving communion of persons who is God. We see a glimpse of how human spousal love opens us to receive, reciprocate and share God’s agape in the first reading today in the love of Tobias and Sarah on the night of their wedding. After praising and thanking God for the gift of marriage in the divine 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 whenever a man and a woman genuinely fall in and remain in love with another. They love with their mind, thinking about the other constantly. They love with their strength, willing to do anything to help the other heroically when the other needs it. They love with their soul, wanting the best for the other’s soul. And they love with all their heart, pouring out great affection.
• During this retreat, as we examine together how we priests are called to be catalysts of the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States, and as we celebrate today a Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist as the Church in various parts of the world celebrates the original proper date of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi that we will mark on Sunday, it’s important that we ponder all of these teachings on love within a Eucharistic key.
• We are called to love the Lord our God in the Holy Eucharist with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. We’re called to love him with our mind, thinking about him, meditating before him, studying in greater depth about this great mystery so that we can love him more and help others to come to believe and love him. We’re summoned to love him with all of our heart, pouring out with affection our praise, gratitude, and reparation, and prioritizing the love of him over every other love. We’re charged to love him with all our soul, making sure our soul has no room for division or sin, but is all his, through taking advantage of the great gift of his mercy. We’re called to love him with all of our strength, making the effort to come to spend time in his presence, to kneel rather than slouch, to go up to the altar of God even on days when we’re far from 100 percent. And we’re summoned to love our neighbor as ourselves and as Jesus loves us. Jesus loves us with himself in the Holy Eucharist by which, as we hear on Holy Thursday, he loves us to the “extreme,” to the very limits of his human heart, mind, soul and strength. We’re called to love others as he loves them — and to seek to bring them Christ’s own Eucharistic love.
• All of this is meant to be done with a holy passion that flows from the nuptial reality of the Church as his bride and our soul as a Church in miniature. 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 that they were seeking to 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 we celebrate today, 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 response to Jesus’ loving us to the extreme in this way, we pray, with St. Thomas’ words in the Adoro Te Devote, “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, as we say, “Amen! Amen!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

So he brought him to the house of Raguel,
whom they found seated by his courtyard gate.
They greeted him first.
He said to them, “Greetings to you too, brothers!
Good health to you, and welcome!”
And he brought them into his home.

Raguel slaughtered a ram from the flock
and gave them a cordial reception.
When they had bathed and reclined to eat, Tobiah said to Raphael,
“Brother Azariah, ask Raguel to let me marry
my kinswoman Sarah.”
Raguel overheard the words; so he said to the boy:
“Eat and drink and be merry tonight,
for no man is more entitled
to marry my daughter Sarah than you, brother.
Besides, not even I have the right to give her to anyone but you,
because you are my closest relative.
But I will explain the situation to you very frankly.
I have given her in marriage to seven men,
all of whom were kinsmen of ours,
and all died on the very night they approached her.
But now, son, eat and drink.
I am sure the Lord will look after you both.”
Tobiah answered,
“I will eat or drink nothing until you set aside what belongs to me.”

Raguel said to him: “I will do it.
She is yours according to the decree of the Book of Moses.
Your marriage to her has been decided in heaven!
Take your kinswoman;
from now on you are her love, and she is your beloved.
She is yours today and ever after.
And tonight, son, may the Lord of heaven prosper you both.
May he grant you mercy and peace.”
Then Raguel called his daughter Sarah, and she came to him.
He took her by the hand and gave her to Tobiah with the words:
“Take her according to the law.
According to the decree written in the Book of Moses
she is your wife.
Take her and bring her back safely to your father.
And may the God of heaven grant both of you peace and prosperity.”
Raguel then called Sarah’s mother and told her to bring a scroll,
so that he might draw up a marriage contract
stating that he gave Sarah to Tobiah as his wife
according to the decree of the Mosaic law.
Her mother brought the scroll,
and Raguel drew up the contract, to which they affixed their seals.

Afterward they began to eat and drink.
Later Raguel called his wife Edna and said,
“My love, prepare the other bedroom and bring the girl there.”
She went and made the bed in the room, as she was told,
and brought the girl there.
After she had cried over her, she wiped away the tears and said:
“Be brave, my daughter.
May the Lord grant you joy in place of your grief.
Courage, my daughter.”
Then she left.

When the girl’s parents left the bedroom
and closed the door behind them,
Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife,
“My love, get up.
Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us
and to grant us deliverance.”
She got up, and they started to pray
and beg that deliverance might be theirs.
And they began to say:

“Blessed are you, O God of our fathers,
praised be your name forever and ever.
Let the heavens and all your creation
praise you forever.
You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve
to be his help and support;
and from these two the human race descended.
You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone;
let us make him a partner like himself.’
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.”

They said together, “Amen, amen,” and went to bed for the night.

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