The Gospel of Charity That Mary Helps Us Ponder and Live, 27th Monday (II), October 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
October 7, 2024
Gal 1:6-12, Ps 111, Lk 10:25-37

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as we celebrate the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary, I can’t help but ponder Michelangelo’s image of the Rosary in his famous Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. He depicts it as a lifeline lifting the children of God up to Jesus’ eternal right. By means of the Holy Rosary, we enter into the contemplation of the life of Christ through the contemplative perspective of Mary herself, so that we may “imitate what [the mysteries] contain and obtain what they promise.” They promise ultimately union with her Son, a union that is meant to last forever. They seek to help us, as we pray in the Salve Regina to conclude the Rosary, come, “after this our exile,” to behold “the blessed fruit of [Mary’s] womb.” They ultimately are meant to lift us up to heaven.
• Today in the Gospel, Jesus describes the path to heaven. A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe what he thinks the answer is from his study of the law. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus gave elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized that the struggle for this scribe would be to practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere curiosity, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach him who really loves his neighbor, before adding, “Go and do the same.”
• Jesus changed the way that he looked at loving his neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not his neighbor that he should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to being willing to love and treat with mercy whoever one meets. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. That’s what it means to become a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us with all our wounds every morning. He wants us to follow him in loving like this.
• Insofar as we, too, need not just to love God with all we are but to become Good Samaritans to all in order to inherit eternal life, it’s important for us to enter more deeply into this parable of Jesus. Jesus describes a mugged man left in a ditch dying. A priest and a Levite journey by that route — two people who were religious, who should have been living by God’s command to love their neighbor — but, seeing the dying man, pass by the other side. Perhaps they were late for an appointment at the temple. Perhaps they didn’t want to become ritually impure by touching the man’s blood, which would mean that they would have to inconvenience themselves by taking a ritual bath. But they failed to approach. Finally a Samaritan saw him, drew near, inconvenienced himself, bathed and nursed his wounds, brought him to an inn where he cared for him all night, then paid the inn-keepers to continue caring for him promising that he would return to see whether they did so and to pay them anything extra they had spent. If Jesus were giving this parable today, instead of “Samaritan” he would have substituted “pimp” or “drug dealer” or “mobster” or “terrorist.” The Samaritan was the last person a Jew would have anticipated would have drawn near because of the centuries long mutual antipathy between Jews and Samaritans. Yet he did. The implication would be that if a sinful loser like a Samaritan drew near, we should all do so. When Jesus asked the scribe who proved himself to be a neighbor to the Samaritan, he responded, “The one who treated him with mercy,” and Jesus told him to go and do the same, to treat everyone with mercy whenever we encounter someone in need. That’s the path to heaven, precisely because it’s the path of Jesus. To be a Christian means to be a Good Samaritan. It means to draw near. It means to cross the road. It means to act with mercy. The Kingdom of God Christ came to establish is a Kingdom of Good Samaritans in which we recognize we’re our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and readily — not just out of duty but out of genuine, sincere neighborly love — tend to the wounds those around us have. The more we ponder Jesus’ own wounds in his sacred humanity, the more straightforward this becomes. The Rosary helps us precisely to do this. In his beautiful exhortation, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, St. John Paul II spoke about the way pondering Jesus helps us to love him in others. The pope wrote in a section on peace — highly relevant today as we pray for peace in the Holy Land on the first anniversary of the horrible terrorist attacks by Hamas — “The Rosary is also a prayer for peace because of the fruits of charity which it produces. When prayed well in a truly meditative way, the Rosary leads to an encounter with Christ in his mysteries and so cannot fail to draw attention to the face of Christ in others, especially in the most afflicted. How could one possibly contemplate the mystery of the Child of Bethlehem, in the joyful mysteries, without experiencing the desire to welcome, defend and promote life, and to shoulder the burdens of suffering children all over the world? How could one possibly follow in the footsteps of Christ the Revealer, in the mysteries of light, without resolving to bear witness to his ‘Beatitudes’ in daily life? And how could one contemplate Christ carrying the Cross and Christ Crucified, without feeling the need to act as a ‘Simon of Cyrene’ for our brothers and sisters weighed down by grief or crushed by despair? Finally, how could one possibly gaze upon the glory of the Risen Christ or of Mary Queen of Heaven, without yearning to make this world more beautiful, more just, more closely conformed to God’s plan?” The Rosary, in short, should help us day by day, decade by decade, become Good Samaritans. If it isn’t, we’re not yet praying it right.
• The Parable of the Good Samaritan is at the heart of the Gospel. St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians — which we begin today and will ponder over the next nine weekdays — calls us not to forsake this Gospel Christ has announced for “another Gospel.” He calls us not to water down the call, not to pretend as if we can just love those we choose to be our neighbors, not to pretend as if we can love “enough.” Jesus, who summons us to be true neighbors to those in need, to cross the road, to be filled with compassion, doesn’t leave us on our own to do so, but wants to strengthen us and help us from within to “go and do the same.” He’s already strengthened us by his teaching but now he wants to fortify us by his very presence within so that we can become ever more the hands, feet and heart of the Mystical Body crossing the road with him to care for all those whom he loved so much to die for. To “go and do the same” is to “do this in memory of him.” The Lord remembers his Covenant forever, as prayed in today’s Psalm, and as we prepare to receive Him who is the New and Eternal Covenant we ask him to help us to love Him as we deserves — with our life, our soul, our all — and to love our neighbor just as he does, so that we may offer our body, our blood, our lives to lift them from the Road to Jericho and accompany them all the way to the celestial Jerusalem. This is what our Lady is praying for. This is why she extends to us the Rosary beads by which she seeks through contemplation with her in her school to lift us up!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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