The Most Important Thing on the Exam of Life, Thirtieth Sunday (A), October 29, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
October 29, 2023
Ex 22:20-26, Ps 18:2-4.47.51, 1 Thess 1:5-10; Mt 22:34-40

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• By the time students get admitted to Columbia, whether by brilliance, long hours of study, or both, most have become superb in acing exams, writing papers and excelling in all other areas of evaluation. While standards, competition and workloads are generally higher here, making top marks more challenging, most continue to do well. Today, in the Gospel, Jesus speaks to us about what excellence in life really means. And as we prepare in the upcoming month of November to ponder prayerfully the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and the definitive self-exclusion from God we call hell — Jesus our Savior, like the greatest teacher of all time he is, wants to prepare us to ace the one test that really matters, the final exam of human life. He tells us ahead of time what’s going to be on this open book examination and hopes to inspire us now to prepare for it better than even we prepare for the most antagonistic doctoral defenses. So let’s given him our full attention.
• In today’s Gospel, Jesus was himself being tested by the chief priests and elders of the people in the Temple area. They were plotting against him because of his having cleansed the Temple after he had triumphantly entered the holy city of Jerusalem. After he sought to summon them to conversion by the parables of the Two Sons, the Corrupt Tenants, and the Wedding Banquet, which we’ve heard over the last month, they plotted to trap him in speech, first by the Pharisees’ and Herodians’ asking him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, then by the Sadducees’ asking him about the resurrection through a story of a woman who had successively married seven brothers, and today by a scribe’s asking him which commandment is the greatest.
• Because we’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times to the young scholar’s question, we can think that it is basically a query fit for a second-grade catechism test. In fact, in context, it was far more like a 100 mile-per-hour curve ball that started directed at a batter’s head. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest and most important was something that the scholars of the law had found challenging for centuries. Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord, our God, is Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus changes a little what he had had Moses say 13 centuries before. He uses heart, soul and “mind,” stressing, it seems, that the scholar and his other interrogators needed to learn how to love with their mind, rather than use it for evil, as they were doing right then trying to entrap him. He also uses the second person singular, to stress that he was speaking not just in general to a theoretical question, but summoning the very scholar of the law who asked him the question not just to know the answer but live it. Notice that Jesus didn’t say that the most important commandment was to believe in God. The most important thing was to let that faith in God overflow into action. He makes plain that loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in the image of God who is love. Jesus’ reply emphasizes that it’s not enough to love God a little, or with half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for himlike he sacrificed for us.
• Through Moses, God had commanded faithful Jews to ground their whole life on this command. We read in the Book of Deuteronomy, God said, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9). Even though they recited these words when they awoke and went to bed, even though they made leather pouch called a phylactery to contain these words as an emblem on their forehead, another leather box called a tefillim with the same words to wrap around their non-dominant forearm, and a tube called a mezuzah with the words that they would install next to their front door frame, they still hadn’t fully realized its supremacy and its relevance to the very situations like they had in the temple area with Jesus, the God-man standing and speaking in front of them.
• Jesus didn’t, however, stop there. He cared too much about his interlocutors. He knew that if he spoke just about the love of God, many, including his interrogators, would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us can be tempted to think we love God by the simple fact that we don’t hate him, or acknowledge him, or revere him and or have warm sentiments of grateful affection toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God. Since love means idem velle, idem nolle, wanting the same things and rejecting the same things, Jesus wanted to help them learn that to love God means to love what and whom he loves. This was obviously a particular issue for the young scholar who thought he loved God while he was at that very moment slyly trying to trip up Jesus.
• So Jesus added something else, unsolicited and expected, a twist that the scholar of the law and those cheering him on needed to hear. Jesus said that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest and most important: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ). The clear index of how we love God, Jesus says, is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. This, too, has to be made concrete, because we can think we love our neighbor by the simple fact we’re not hating or harming our neighbor. Jesus calls us to love ourselves and then to love our neighbor as ourselves. That means to care for your neighbor the way we care for ourselves, to do to our neighbor what we do and would want done to ourselves, and to put all our mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like we’re summoned to give God. Just as we care for ourselves and strive to stay healthy, fed and hydrated, and so much more, Jesus wants us to concern ourselves to the same degree with our neighbor’s wellbeing. During the Last Supper, however, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even more explicit. He would say, not, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). No longer would authentic self-love be the standard for the way we care for our neighbor, and not even would our love for God be the metric, but Jesus’ love for us would be the benchmark. We see this illustrated powerfully after the Resurrection. When Jesus asked Simon Peter three times whether he loved him and three times Simon said he did, Jesus told him, “Feed my sheep,” “Feed my lambs,” and “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for the Lord would be shown in the way that he loved all those whom God has entrusted to his care. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer, to justify himself, followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?,” the one whom we’re supposed to love as ourselves, Jesus gave the Parable of the Good Samaritan, stressing that everyone is in our neighborhood, that we’re called to cross the street to care for others in their need, to sacrifice our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our time, money, and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John the Apostle, who was present when Jesus spoke the words of today’s Gospel, drew the obvious conclusion for the members of the early Church when he wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20-21).
• So Jesus calls us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and as Jesus loves us and our neighbor. When people look at you, or me, or any other member of the Catholic Church, they should see — they have a right to see — someone who has given 100 percent of his heart, 100 percent of her soul, 100 percent of the mind and strength to God and is seeking to love others as God loves us and them. They should see a disciple and apostle who never thinks that he or she can love God or others “enough,” but rather someone who is so smitten with the love of God who loved us first that he or she becomes inflamed with that love for God and others.
• What does that mean practically? If we’re truly loving God with all our heart, we will have a great hunger to spend time with him in prayer, for those in love always seek to spend time with the one loved. It means we’ll be faithful to him out of love, in things big and small, just like spouses and best friends are faithful to each other. If we’re loving him with all our mind, we’ll be using the gift of our intelligence to get to know him, his word, and his teaching better, so that we can understand him and help others better to come to know him. If we’re loving him with all of our soul, then we’ll be seeking to keep that soul full of the love of him and clean, having regular recourse to the Sacrament of Confession whereby he’ll forgive us for any infidelity that sullies the soul. If we’re loving him with all our strength, then we’ll be making the effort to put him first, to prioritize him over other priorities, to be willing to make even hard sacrifices for him who laid down his life to sav ours. And if we’re genuinely loving our neighbor, then we will be seeking to treat our neighbor with the same concrete actions of love with which Jesus would treat our neighbor and with which we would want to treat Jesus. These are, indeed, high standards, but Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own. He fills us with his love and sends us the Holy Spirit to make this standard possible. But we’ve got to want it, we’ve got to will it, we’ve got to make the effort to respond to that help to live up to what he summons us.
• There’s one other part of Jesus’ response that we shouldn’t miss, because it’s super important for us to know about the Christian moral life in general. It’s a sentence I have found to be one of the most helpful in the entire Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: Jesus says, “On these two commandments,” of love of God and love of neighbor, “hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the love of God and love of others. This is so different from the way many, especially young people, often look at the commandments. Many can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. They can think that God and the Church fundamentally give us a litany of “thou shalt nots,” rather than a list of the ways we are able to grow in love. We see this confusion often with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality or the fifth commandment prohibiting the taking of innocent human life. Some that they violate these commandments precisely out of love, saying love is the justification for their sexual sins and even abortion. But the commandments are all expressions of love for God and others and to violate them is to violate love. We can do a quick gloss on the Decalogue to show the point. How can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or abusing his name? How can we claim to love him if we don’t come to worship him on the day he calls his own? How can we love our parents if we dishonor them? How can we love others if we hate or kill them — or attack people at kibbutzes and parties, or bomb their housing complexes to rubble, or attack them in bowling alleys and bars, as we’ve seen lately in the news? How can we love our spouse — present or future — if we are unfaithful? How can we truly love another if we use the person for our sexual pleasure and risk their eternal salvation? How can we love someone if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love someone if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God is one that precisely trains us how to love. Every violation of God’s commandments is a violation of love of God or love of neighbor. Therefore, whenever God tells us “Thou shalt not…,” the prohibition is to help us to preserve love. It is like a signpost keeping us on the pathway of true love. God out of love gave us not only each of the ten commandments, but also the rest of his moral teaching, like the Beatitudes and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And Jesus makes keeping them a criterion for genuine love of him. That’s why during the Last Supper he told us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and later “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17).
• And so are we going to excel, as Christians, in love of God and of others? St. John asked the first Christians, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. … He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” This is something that Moses pointed out in today’s first reading that the Israelites were not doing. They were oppressing resident aliens, abusing widows and orphans, charging exorbitant interest rates on loans or demanding indispensable pawns in exchange. Doubtless those who were doing so had what they thought were justifications. But God said that their behavior couldn’t be justified. It needed to change. We need to be on guard against the same type of hardening of heart, because that lack of charity can grow into activities and even atrocities that eventually dominate the evening news.
• We’ve seen lately when the world lives by a different set of standards than those to which Our Lord is calling us in today’s Gospel. Three weeks ago yesterday, Hamas terrorists left Gaza and killed 1,400 people, kidnapping 220 others. Rather than loving their neighbor, they brutally murdered vast multitudes in kibbutzes, families in their homes and young people in parties. And yet many, as we saw yesterday in Brooklyn, or even a couple of weeks ago on campus, many have been cheering on and justifying this sacrilege against God and against those made in his image, such that Jews in Crown Heights on the sabbath were told not to go outside lest they suffer violence from mobs. Since Hamas’ strike, Israel has been bombing Gaza, attacks that have intensified over the last couple of days, leveling so many buildings in the city and killing over 7,000 people, while many look the other way, claiming that the end of eliminating terrorists like Hamas justifies even the immoral means of killing thousands of non-combatants. Loving God and neighbor can never justify mass murder of our neighbor as collateral damage. In Lewiston, Maine, this week, home to one of New England’s most beautiful Churches, a gunman went into a bowling alley and restaurant and took the lives of 18 of his neighbors, and shot and injured another 13.
• This morning, when I celebrated Mass for the Missionaries of Charity in the Bronx, I reminded the Sisters of Saint Teresa of Calcutta what their foundress prophetically had said. “Today, if we have no peace,” she said, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other — that man, that woman, that child, is my brother or sister. If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we should still need tanks and generals?” She said that we need to confront the evil at its source. “The biggest disease today,” she said elsewhere, “is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside, the victim of exploitation, corruption, poverty, and disease.” After the diagnosis, she gave the prescription: “If we really want to conquer the world, we will not be able to do it with bombs or with other weapons of destruction. Let us conquer the world with our love. Let us interweave our lives with bonds of sacrifice and love, and it will be possible for us to conquer the world.”
• That’s Jesus’ way. That’s the way of the saints, whom we will be celebrating in a particular way on All Saints Day this Wednesday, which is a holy day of obligation. By our Baptism, we’re all called to be not just good people, but saints. Sanctity is the perfection of love. The saints are those who strive with the help of God’s grace to love God with all they’ve got and to love their neighbor concretely in deeds. In the twilight of life, Saint John of the Cross once wrote, we will be judged by love, on how we’ve prioritized God and how we’ve cared for him in the distressing disguise of someone hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. St. Paul wrote that even if we have the faith to move mountains or be martyred but don’t have loved, we are just making noise. In today’s second reading, taken from his First Letter to the Thessalonians, he stresses, “You became imitators of us and of the Lord.” We are called to follow Christ and the saints in the perfection of love, to make resolutions to prioritize the love of God and to commit to loving our neighbor the way God loves us, starting with the most proximate neighbors, those we live and interact with on a daily basis, but extending even to those who have made themselves our enemies. The question for us is: Do we believe in Jesus enough to follow this way of love, as St. Paul did, as St. Teresa of Calcutta did?
• The way we’re strengthened to love God and our neighbor this way is at Mass. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his beautiful 2006 encyclical on the love of God and neighbor, “In sacramental communion, I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants. … Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. … Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. … Eucharistic communion includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist that does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.” As I like to emphasize, when Jesus through the priest at Mass says the words, “Do this in memory of me!,” the “this” is not just the celebration of the rite of the New Passover, which is the Mass; it’s also his call to break our bodies, to shed our sweat and blood, out of love for others. We can have no greater love for our neighbor than to give of ourselves out of love for them in life and in death. All the law and the prophets hang on this two-fold commandment of love, and therefore the Eucharist, which helps us to put both into practice, is the synthesis of everything Jesus has taught. Living this reality is the means to respond to all the violence and lack of love for God and others that plagues our world. Living a truly Eucharistic life is the path toward holiness, happiness and heaven. It’s also the way for us to pass the final exam of life and come to experience forever the eternal communion of love, with God and others, that is the communion of saints. May Jesus whom we’re about to receive so change us in holy communion that others, in meeting us, may readily see those who, with all their mind, heart, soul and strength, are striving to make our lives a commentary on Jesus’ two-fold command of love, as witnesses to Jesus who seeks to love God the Father and others through, with and in us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

“If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
by demanding interest from him.
If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body.
What else has he to sleep in?
If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.”

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