Returning to, and Loving, the Lord and Others with All We Are and Have, Third Friday of Lent, March 17, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of St. Patrick
Readings from the Friday of the Third Week of Lent
March 17, 2023
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 attempted in the homily: 

• 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 merciful love and to share his compassion with others, a summons that not only should influence the way we read today’s Gospel, but is also at the heart of this second phase of Lent — from the 3rd Sunday through the end of the 4th week — when we ponder the meaning of baptism for the Elect preparing for Baptism as well as for all of us who need to grow in living the consequences of our baptism. We can interpret today’s reading in a baptismal key, for this is one of the most commonly chosen readings for the celebration of baptism, since it shows us what the purpose of a Christian life is and how we can keep our end of the baptismal Covenant with the Lord. 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, 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 merciful love 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 him, 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 and gifts that he’s given us for him and his glory. It’s not enough to give God some of our 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. We need to examine how we use our mind to love the Lord, to seek to think as he thinks, to fill our minds with his thoughts through prayer and reading the Bible and good spiritual books. We need to look at whether we love him with all our heart, loving him more than everything and everyone else in our life, including our life. We need to question whether we’re loving him with 100 percent of our strength, overcoming inertia to come to be with him, battling through distractions in prayer, striving to please him every way we can. We need to ask whether we are trying to give him our whole soul through remaining in the state of grace, the state of our baptism, through the gift of the Sacrament of Confession and through not allowing anything unworthy of him to reside in our soul. In the Gospel today, however, Jesus goes a step further than that challenge. He tells us that our love for God will be shown in our love for neighbor. And so we similarly need to ask whether we are striving to love our neighbor with all our mind, thinking about him, trying to understand him and lead him to God; with all our heart, with affection, including and especially those neighbors most difficult to love; with all our strength, sacrificing for them, forgiving them, going the extra mile for them; and with all our soul, seeking to love them together with God and caring in a special way for their souls.
• Such total, committed love is the “straight path” that the Lord wants us to take, to quote from the end of today’s first reading from the Prophet Hosea. It’sthe path that those who are “just,” who are in a right relationship with God, take. It’s not enough to know what we must do, but Jesus wants us to take that straight path of love. Faith requires more than understanding; it requires action. Jesus says to the scribe in today’s Gospel, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The scribe was close to it by his understanding, but he was not yet in it. Like him, we need to do more than merely know that we’re called to love God and our neighbor holding nothing back; we actually have to love.
• Today we celebrate someone who loved God and neighbor by this standard, Saint Patrick, the patron saint of the Archdiocese of New York. Even though St. Patrick’s father was a deacon and his grandfather a married priest, St. Patrick wrote in his Confession that at the age of 16 he really didn’t know God. He was kidnapped from his native Scotland and brought into slavery for six years in Ireland, but it was there that God revealed himself to him and Patrick sought to love him back. He wrote that while shepherding his master’s flocks, he began to pray, sometimes spending whole nights in prayer. One night in a dream, when he was 22, he heard a voice telling him to be ready for a brave effort to secure his freedom. He trusted in the dream. In the morning, he escaped and hustled 200 miles to a boat that he saw in the dream was about to depart. After adventures and hardship during which he was able to bring many of the ship’s crew to conversion, he arrived home. But after several days of joyous reunion with the family he loved very much, he began to be moved in prayer and in dreams to think of all those back in Ireland who had never known the Gospel. Against the wishes of his beloved family, out of love for God and for those who had formerly held him in captivity, he decided to use his newly found freedom to dedicate himself to returning to the land of his captors, to preach to them the truth that would set them free. The Lord had used his slavery to teach him the language he would need, to help him develop the necessary zeal, to return to lead the Irish to salvation. He had no illusions, however, about how difficult the task was that lay in front of him. He went to France to prepare for the priesthood. In France, he prayed, fasted and readied himself for 20 years. At the age of 43, having been consecrated bishop so that he could found churches and ordain priests, he set off with a few apostolic collaborators. Over the course of the next 30 years, he labored tenaciously for the conversion of the nation. As one of the great “Lenten” saints, he famously fasted for 40 days and 40 nights on what is now called Croagh Patrick in prayerful bodily supplication that those entrusted to him would receive the Gospel with faith. Village by village, chieftain by chieftain, he planted the seed of the Gospel. Though his life was in constant peril due to the hatred of the druids, he soldiered on, and through prayer, mortification, disputations, and miracles, his life of faith bore enormous fruit. Twelve years after his arrival, he was able to found the Church of Armagh, Ireland’s primatial see. By the time of his death in 461, the whole nation was Christian and was walking the straight path of justice and love. One of the most important parts of his work was to reveal the Trinity to them and to help them not just know “about” the one God in three persons, but to enter into relationship with God who is love. His most famous prayer is his “breastplate” or “lorica,” words he wrote on a piece of clothing and wore under his clothes above his heart. It was what he used to pray every morning as his morning offering, consecrating the day to God. It begins, “I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me, God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s hosts to save me.” The most famous line of that lorica is his prayer, “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” He sought to surround himself by Christ, so that he would be able to love Christ with all his mind, heart, soul and strength and so that Christ could use Patrick’s mind, heart, soul and strength to love others.
• The fulfillment of the prayer to be with Christ who seeks to remain with us always until the end of time is here at Mass, where we are best able to grow to love God with all we are and have and love our neighbor with all we are and have. Here at Mass, as we pray in today’s opening prayer, 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 merciful love, he gives us his help, he plants within us Jesus, the Incarnate Love of the Father, so that we may, receiving 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, just like Patrick did 1600 years ago, in love for others as Jesus has given all he had for us and our salvation.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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