Putting Into Practice Jesus’ Most Challenging Commandment of All, 23rd Thursday (I), September 9, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Peter Claver
September 9, 2021
Col 3:12-17, Ps 150, Lk 6:27-38

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The most revolutionary and challenging part of the Gospel — what distinguishes Christianity from every other religion and moral philosophy — is Jesus’ command to love our enemies. He calls us to do far more than merely tolerate them or not be subsumed with a spirit of revenge. He calls us to love them, to be willing to die for them, to do good to them when they hate us, to bless them when they curse us, to pray for them when they mistreat us, to turn the other cheek when they slap our first, and give our tunic to those who take our cloak. In doing so, Jesus is trying to help us to learn how to be like him, to act in accordance with his image and likeness in which we were created. He tells us today that if we do so, we will be “children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” We will become “merciful, just as also your Father is merciful.” He tells us that if we live by this standard, if we measure out in this way, “gifts will be given to you, a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing will be poured into your lap,” not necessarily of course by terrorists and persecutors but by God himself. If we judge others harshly, we will be judged by that standard; if we condemn others, we will be condemned by the same principles, if we refuse to forgive, neither will we be forgiven. But if we measure out lovingly, our own hearts will expand to receive more and more of his infinite love.
• We learn from Jesus how to live this Gospel. He loves those who don’t love him and even those who have made themselves his enemies through sin. He blesses those who curse him and blaspheme against him. He gives and gives and gives, and forgives, forgives and forgives. We see this Gospel put into practice in all its clarity on Good Friday, as Jesus prayed to the Father to forgive his executioners, those who were mocking him, and all those whose sins were bringing about his expiatory death, “for they know not what they are doing.” When the soldiers of the High Priest or the Roman guards slapped him on one cheek, Jesus could have easily annihilated them by his power of God, but he didn’t fight back, because he loved those who were harming him and didn’t want to harm them back. When they stripped him of his cloak, he allowed them to strip him of his tunic as well. When they bid him to walk on the road to Calvary, he walked a second mile. In all of this, Jesus tells us, “Come, follow me!” He wants us to be distinguished from all the rest by the way we, as Christians, love everyone like he does, including those who don’t love us. “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same.” When he tells us, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” he is ultimately saying, “love others with the same forgiving love with which you would want to be loved by others.” Jesus is calling us to respond to evil with good, to respond to cursing with prayer, to respond to hatred with love. The word for love he uses is agape, not philia (the love between friends) or eros (the love between a husband or wife). Agape means unconquerable benevolence, that no matter what others do to us, we keep loving, we don’t descend to their level of hatred by vengeance, but seek to unite the experience to God and to respond with and like God. Note that he’s not calling us to like our enemies, to hang with them, or to have warm, fuzzy feelings about them. But he is calling us never to stop wishing them well, never to stop doing them good, never to stop praying for them and their conversion from their wicked ways, and never to stop asking God to forgive them for their homicidal and evil ignorance that gets them diabolically to imitate Cain.
• Part of that unconquerable benevolence involves trying to stop them from doing evil, because we wouldn’t love someone if we enabled them to continue to behave in a way that does harm to others and immeasurably damages their soul. We don’t love an alcoholic by buying him a bottle of Bourbon. We don’t love terrorists by permitting them to continue to commit atrocities. We intervene. We stop them. But we do so out of love, not vengeance. Jesus in the Gospel calls us to turn or “offer” the other cheek, which is normally misinterpreted to mean that we offer ourselves as a victim to let the other smack the unsmacked side of our face. When we turn our cheek to someone who has slapped us with a backhand, however, we’re actually rotating in such a way that he no longer has access to slapping either of our cheeks. It responds to the violence by affirming our dignity without retaliation. “Turning the other cheek” doesn’t allow others to continue to victimize us. It actually calls us to stand up to defend our dignity without falling to the others’ level.
• Saint Paul was someone who loved this way in the midst of all of his sufferings and in today’s first reading he calls the Colossians to the same standard of love. He wants to vest us in the Lord’s own virtues and most especially and “over all” to “put on love, that is the bond of perfection,” and “in word or in deed, [to] do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.” We’re called to imitate Jesus’ “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,” to “bear with one another and forgive one another … as the Lord has forgiven you,” to let the “peace of Christ control your hearts” and rather than complaints or woes to “be thankful” and to sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.” That is the way we will be true children of the Father, like Jesus his Son.
• Someone who lived with these virtues, who brought light to one of the darkest places on earth, and who helped people learn how to love who could have easily and understandably been filled with hate is the saint we celebrate today, St. Peter Claver, the great apostle to the slaves in Colombia. As a young Jesuit, he left his native Spain in order to go to Cartagena to minister to the African slaves when they would disembark after a brutal trans-Pacific journey, be sold and bought. Their condition was execrable. He spent his last 44 years of life as a slave to the slaves, a Good Samaritan, catechizing them by learning their dialects or finding translators, baptizing more than 300,000 of them, sharing their life and doing everything he could to introduce them to Christ and to how he has overturned worldly values. He slept in the slaves’ quarters rather than in their masters’ when he came to preach missions to them. And he sought to bring the message of conversion to the slaveowners. In the letter that the Church ponders on his feast day in the Office of Readings, he shows how everything culminated in introducing them to the mystery of God’s love on the Cross, so that they may unite their own sufferings to Christ and become truly interior free. “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity,” he wrote to his Jesuit superiors, “numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them. … We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground or rather in puddles of mud. … We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. … There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of this sort, … we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see. This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions that somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick. After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. When by their answers to our questions they showed they had sufficiently understood this, we went on to a more extensive instruction, namely, about the one God, who rewards and punishes each one according to his merit, and the rest. We asked them to make an act of contrition and to manifest their detestation of their sins. Finally, when they appeared sufficiently prepared, we declared to them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. Showing them Christ fastened to the cross, as he is depicted on the baptismal font on which streams of blood flow down from his wounds, we led them in reciting an act of contrition in their own language.” Everything ultimately led to their focus on Christ fastened to the Cross and how the blood and water flowing from his side made Baptism a real share in his passion, death and resurrection. He was showing them how to enter into and participate in Christ’s love which made him capable of bearing such enormous sufferings. He was helping them to recognize Christ could make them rich in their poverty, and to sanctify their hunger, their sufferings, even their dehumanization, for Christ ultimately identified with them in their maltreatment. Today he appeals to us, who suffer far less, to live the words Jesus and St. Paul communicate.
• The place where we learn how to love our enemies and put on God’s love is here at Mass, where we enter into Jesus’ own prayer of mercy, where we let the word of Christ dwell in us richly, where we sing with gratitude to God and are strengthened by Christ on the inside to do everything in his name. This is the “good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, … poured into [our] lap,” giving us the standard by which to measure out anew to others. This is where we’re strengthened to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, and to love by Christ’s measure. Let us ask for the grace to put into practice these words with the same zeal and commitment as St. Peter Claver and those whom he catechized, baptized, and prepared for God.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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