Returning to the Lord with Our Whole Heart, and Mind, and Soul, and Strength, Third Friday of Lent, March 20, 2020

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

• 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 can influence the way we read today’s Gospel, but is also important in this second phase of Lent — from the 3rd Sunday through the end of the 4th week — when we ponder the meaning of baptism. We can read 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 mercy 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.
  • Jesus calls us to love him with all our mind. How much of our mind do we dedicate to God? Do we try to think as God thinks in our decisions? Do we truly fill our minds with his thoughts through prayer and reading the Bible and good spiritual books or do we fill them with the world’s thoughts through reading the paper more than the Bible and surfing the internet or watching television more than we pray?
  • Jesus likewise calls us to love him with all our heart. Do we really love God more than we love everything and everyone else in our life? Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel that we’re not fit to be his disciple unless we love him more than our family members, more than our stuff, more than even our own life. This is obviously challenging but do we try to love him with all our heart?
  • He calls us to love him with all our strength. How much effort do we make to love him? Do we battle through distractions in prayer? Do we prioritize Mass and adoration and make the effort to get there, especially during times like this when it is much more challenging to do so? When we do attend, do we give it 100 percent to try to pay attention?
  • He calls us to love him with all our soul. That means he wants us full of grace. Do we seek to stay free of all sin or do we compromise with sin and give in to gossip, complaining, holding grudges and the like? Do we take advantage of the opportunities for the Sacrament of Confession so that whatever in our soul is not of God can be forgiven?
• 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. Jesus elsewhere does not say, “Love me as I love you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you.” When he asked St. Peter after the Resurrection, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” and Peter replied that he did, Jesus didn’t say, “Great! That’s all I wanted!” Rather he said, “Feed my sheep. … Feed my lambs. … Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for Jesus, just like ours, would be shown in our love for others.
  • And so we likewise have to ask whether we are striving to love our neighbor with all our mind: are we thinking about our neighbor, trying to understand our neighbor, and lead our neighbor to God through the neighbor’s own categories? Do we think good things about them, noticing their good points rather than their weaknesses, giving them the benefit of the doubt rather than thinking the worst.
  • How about with all of our heart? Do we only half-love, trying to keep appearances of loving while inside not loving with mercy and understanding for the things in our neighbor we don’t appreciate? Do we love them with affection, including those who are difficult to love, and making the effort to care for the wounds of their heart.
  • Do we strive to love our neighbor with all of our strength? Are we sacrificing for our neighbors and going the extra mile to help them with deeds? Do we summon the strength to forgive them?
  • Finally what about with all of our soul? Since when we’re in the state of grace, God is in our soul, do we strive to love our neighbor together with God? Do we care in a special way for their souls, that they be full of God?
• Jesus says to the scribe in today’s Gospel, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” He’s close to it by his understanding, but he’s not in it. The reason is because faith requires more than understanding; it requires action. 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.
• To paraphrase the end of the passage of the Prophet Hosea in today’s first reading, this is the “straight path” that the Lord wants us to take. This is the path that those who are “just,” who are in a right relationship with God, take. As demanding as the path is, the Lord calls us to it because he knows that this is the path of happiness. Someone who is loving the Lord with all he has and loving neighbor is the one who is really filled with joy and peace and Jesus wants us to have that joy. St. Therese Lisieux once famously said that we cannot become half a saint. That there’s no way to become holy and eternally happy giving God fifty percent. We need to give him everything. That’s the type of restoration that Lent seeks to bring about in us.
• But we need to ask: How can we actually love God and others with everything we are and have? Is God calling us to something impossible? Is it even possible to command us to love; can love be forced? The answer to these questions was given to us in the Opening Prayer of today’s Mass when we turned to God and said, “Pour your grace into our hearts, we pray, O Lord, that we may … obey by your own gift the heavenly teaching you give us.” God gives us his own love — his very self —  to make this type of love possible. He says to us through Hosea today, “Because of me you bear fruit!” Pope Benedict spoke about this in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est. He wrote, “The ‘commandment’ of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given. … on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter that has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. … Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints—consider the example of [Saint] Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love.” When we understand God’s love — his hesed, a word that can be translated “mercy,” “love” and “goodness” — we can also see how it is possible, for when we love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, what that means fundamentally is that we have opened ourselves up to his mercy, to who he is and what he wants to do for us and in us, and that is to make us holy as he is holy, perfect as he is perfect, merciful as he is merciful. He wants us to open our mind to his merciful love, our heart to his merciful love, our soul to be forgiven by his merciful love, and our strength to persevere in seeking and receiving that merciful love. And then he wants us to love our neighbor not just by imitating God’s merciful love, but by loving our neighbor precisely with it.
• The great way she grew in the love of God and we will too, so that we may love God with all we are and have and love our neighbor with all we are and have is through the Mass. Here at Mass 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 mercy, 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 in mercy for the good of others as Jesus has given all he had for us and our salvation. Praised be Jesus Christ!