The Lord’s Guidance Along the Everlasting Way of Love, 23rd Thursday (II), September 13, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
September 13, 2018
1 Cor 8:1-7.11-13, Ps 139, 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: 

• Today we prayed in the Psalm, “Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way.” God is the one who probes and knows us, he knows when we set or stand, he understands our thoughts from afar, he scrutinizes our journeys and rest and is familiar with our ways, he has formed our inmost being and knitted us together in our mother’s womb, he tries us and knows our thoughts — so he is one who in knowing us knows exactly the path we need to journey in order to enter into everlasting life with him. Today he reveals to us that path. It is a path of love, receiving his love and loving others in return.
• Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel about loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who mistreat us, turning the other cheek, and giving our tunic (our pants and shirt) to those who take our cloak (jacket) are always challenging. What Jesus is essentially saying is that God wants us to become like him, to act in accordance with his image and likeness in which we were created. He tells us today that if we live what he challenges us to do today we will be “children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as also your Father is merciful.” He goes on to say that God has given us a standard that he wants us to follow and that if we do “gifts will be given to you, a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing will be poured into your lap.” But he also tells us that “the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” 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. God wants us to live and behave like him, but if we refuse, and live by the opposite principles, those are the principles with which we’ll be judging and condemning ourselves. At the same time if we measure out lovingly, our own hearts will expand to receive more and more of his infinite love.
• We learn from God himself 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.” If we want to be loved by others, he says we need to pay it forward: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” In other words, “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. 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 going, 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.
• St. Paul shows us that love in today’s first reading. He says, “Love builds up,” and that he was willing to do anything for others because he sees each one as a “brother for whom Christ died.” If Jesus loved them enough to die for them, then we can certainly give up meat sacrificed to idols if it would scandalize them. This is part of the everlasting way.
• St. John Chrysostom, whom the Church celebrates today, is another who followed the Lord along the everlasting way and helped others to do so. St. John Chrysostom is most famous for his preaching, but he also lived very much the type of charity to which today’s readings call us. When he was baptized between the age of 18-22 (scholars disagree), he began to live a truly different life. He was the greatest student of the rhetorician Libanius, who wanted him to succeed him, but instead he left the world for a time to fill his mind with the things of God. He spent two years as a hermit continually standing, scarcely sleeping, and learning the Bible — God’s thoughts given to us — by heart. He was so zealous that he damaged his stomach and kidneys and needed to return for reasons of health. There the Patriarch of Antioch ordained him a deacon and then a priest and allowed him to begin to preach publicly, and his sermons quickly became famous and his eloquence, speaking about the things of God, calling people to conversion, reverberated throughout the empire. In 397, he was elected Patriarch of Constantinople — another Patriarchal see at the center of the empire — and there he went. Whereas he could have lived a sumptuous life, he lived poor; rather than be a social animal, he wept; rather than feast he fasted; rather than bask in his reputation over his oratory, he used it to call everyone, including the emperor and empress to conversion. For this he quickly became a sign of contradiction and suffered, being exiled many times. But that didn’t shake him, because he knew it would happen for anyone who modeled his life and preaching after Christ. His example inspired so many of his day to sanctity and courageously to seek the things of God by the way of the beatitudes. The sermon taken from this morning’s Office of Readings was preached when he was about to be exiled again. It shows how much he was influenced by God’s word and was willing to embrace derision out of love for God. He was also willing to do it out of love for neighbor, because he was being exiled for the spiritual work of mercy of having admonished the sinner, especially the empress. “The waters have risen and severe storms are upon us, but we do not fear drowning, for we stand firmly upon a rock. Let the sea rage, it cannot break the rock. Let the waves rise, they cannot sink the boat of Jesus,” he said. The Lord of the Lord was able to sustain him in loving those who had made themselves his enemy, to pray for his persecutors, to do good to those who did him evil. He was known for his charity to the poor. We have the breviary lesson from the 21st Saturday of Ordinary Time, which is one of the most moving, in which he says, “Do you want to honor Christ’s body? Then do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honor him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where he is cold and naked. For he who said: This is my body, and made it so by his words, also said: ‘You saw me hungry and did not feed me, and inasmuch as you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did not do it for me.’ What we do here in the church requires a pure heart, not special garments; what we do outside requires great dedication. … Give [God] the honor prescribed in his law by giving your riches to the poor. For God does not want golden vessels but golden hearts. Now, in saying this I am not forbidding you to make such gifts; I am only demanding that along with such gifts and before them you give alms. He accepts the former, but he is much more pleased with the latter. In the former, only the giver profits; in the latter, the recipient does too. A gift to the church may be taken as a form of ostentation, but an alms is pure kindness. Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First, fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table. Will you have a golden cup made but not give a cup of water? What is the use of providing the table with cloths woven of gold thread, and not providing Christ himself with the clothes he needs? What profit is there in that? Tell me: If you were to see him lacking the necessary food but were to leave him in that state and merely surround his table with gold would he be grateful to you or rather would he not be angry? What if you were to see him clad in worn-out rags and stiff from the cold, and were to forget about clothing him and instead were to set up golden columns for him, saying that you were doing it in his honor? Would he not think he was being mocked and greatly insulted? Apply this also to Christ when he comes along the roads as a pilgrim, looking for shelter. You do not take him in as your guest, but you decorate floor and walls and the capitals of the pillars. You provide silver chains for the lamps, but you cannot bear even to look at him as he lies chained in prison. Once again, I am not forbidding you to supply these adornments; I am urging you to provide these other things as well, and indeed to provide them first. No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbor a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons. Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all.”
• He measured out fully and received even more. We prayed in the Collect of the Mass to be able to imitate him in this everlasting way, the way of the Cross, the way of sacrificial love suffered for those who made his life difficult: “O God, strength of those who hope in you, who willed that the Bishop John Chrysostom should be illustrious by his wonderful eloquence and his experience of suffering, grant us, we pray, that instructed by his teachings, we may be strengthened through his example.”
• The great way Jesus teaches us is here at Mass, instructing us with his word and then uniting us to him in Holy Communion.  As we prayed in the Psalm, he probe us, knows us, understands us, scrutinizes us, and form us. We asked him, “See if my way is crooked and lead me in the way of old,” that way that is ever ancient, ever new, that way he himself walked. As we prepare to receive him today, we beg him to lead us from within, like he led St. John Chrysostom, to love like he loves both our friends and our enemies and to know how to do both when they seem to come into conflict.

The readings for today’s Mass were: