The Most Important Thing We Have To Do, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), October 29, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
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: 

• Our world seems to be convulsing with hatred, violence and destruction. Three weeks ago yesterday, Hamas terrorists left Gaza and killed 1,400 people kidnapping 220 others. And yet many, yesterday in Brooklyn, a couple of weeks ago at Columbia, and in many other places have been cheering the violence on, claiming such attacks on the innocent are justified. Since Hamas’ strike, Israel has been bombing Gaza, attacks that have intensified over the last couple of days, leveling many buildings in the city and killing over 7,000, 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. In Ukraine, the war continues. In Lewiston, Maine, this week, site of one of New England’s most beautiful Churches, a gunman went into a bowling alley and restaurant and took the lives of 18, injuring another 13.
• Against this type of darkness and evil, St. Teresa of Calcutta spoke prophetic words. “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.”
• Her words show the crucial relevance of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. Jesus was 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 sought to summon them to conversion by the parables of the Two Sons, the Corrupt Tenants, and the Wedding Banquet, 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 woman who had 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, we can think that it was a question fit for a catechism test for second graders. In fact, in context, it was far more like a doctoral dissertation interrogation. 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 is our God, the 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, to love God with their mind, rather than use one’s mind, as they were doing right then, to conspire to try to entrap him. He also uses the second person singular, to stress that the particular scholar of the law who asked him the question needed not just to know the answer but to live the answer. Jesus makes clear in his response 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 by opening ourselves up to his love. The command stresses 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 God with agape like he sacrificed for us.
• Through Moses, God had commanded faithful Jews to ground their whole life on this command. “Keep these words,” he said, “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 a phylactery to hang them down from their hair and put it into a small leather box so that it would be an emblem on their forehead, another wrapped around their non-dominant forearm, and installed them in a mezuzah next to their front door frame, they still hadn’t realized its supremacy and its relevance to situations like they were in with Jesus, the God-man in front of them.
• But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited, a twist the scholar of the law didn’t expect. Jesus knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many, including his interrogators, would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the simple fact that we don’t hate him, but rather acknowledge him, revere him and have sentiments of grateful affection toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God, because to love him means to love what and whom he loves. And this was particularly an issue for his interlocutor who thought he loved God while he was at that very moment slyly trying to trip up Jesus. So Jesus volunteered that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest: “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. To say love your neighbor as yourself means to care for your neighbor the way you care for yourself, to do to your neighbor what you do to yourself, and to put all your mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like we’re summoned to give God. During the Last Supper, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even clearer. There 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 our love for ourselvesbe the standard for the love of our neighbor, not even would our love for God be the standard, but his love for us would be the metric. When Jesus asked Simon Peter three times after the resurrection 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?” 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 Sunday’s Gospel, made the lesson clear for the members of the early Church when he said, “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 heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. 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 to God and is seeking to love others as God loves us and them. They should see someone acting in the person of Christ, as Christ himself would act. They should see a true Missionary of Charity. 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.
• The thing many miss about Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question is what Jesus says after giving us this two-fold directive of love. By it, he makes love for God and for others very practical and gives us the prism by which to understand not only everything he reveals to us and but also how he calls us, in practice, to love in a manner worthy of our Christian identity. I have found this sentence to be one of the most helpful phrases in the whole Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: “On these two commandments,” Jesus says, “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 neighbor. This is so different from the way many often look at the commandments. Many can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some claim, especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality or the fifth commandment on abortion, that they violate them precisely out of love. But we need to ask ourselves — to do a quick gloss on the Decalogue — how can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or misusing 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? How could we love our spouse 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 trains us precisely 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 each commandment. That’s why Jesus during the Last Supper could tell 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).
• So if we’re truly loving God with all we are and have, we’ll have a deep dedication to prayer, to wanting to spend time with him, just like we love spending time with those we love. We’ll have a great enthusiasm and hunger for being with him at the Mass. We’ll love him with our mind and engage in sacred study, so that we can begin to think as he does rather than as human beings do. We’ll try to love him with all our soul and regularly cleanse the soul of anything unfit for God through devout confessions. Similarly, we’ll have a great love for our neighbor. If God loves our neighbors so much that he died on the Cross to save them, how can we withhold love. As St. John asked the first Christians, “But if any one 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 Jews who were doing it 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 to the same type of hardening of heart, because that lack of charity can grow into activities that eventually make the evening news and many others can begin to justify.
• Pope Benedict, in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, wrote about the positive connection between love of God and neighbor and showed us the way to grow in the most important thing we’re called to do. The deceased Holy Father wrote, “Love of neighbor … consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with [the love of] 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. … Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbor that the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. … Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbor 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 neighbor 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 neighbor 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 that by its very nature must then be shared with others.”
• I’d like to make two quick applications from Jesus’ words today. The first is to All Saints Day, which we’ll celebrate this Wednesday. 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.
• The second application is to the Synod on Synodality, the first phase of which concludes today in the Vatican. The ultimate criterion by which to evaluate the Synod is how it will help those in the Church to learn how to love God and love neighbor in accordance with the truth about God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Listening, accompanying, walking with others in a synodal way cannot be left simply as an exercise in community building, but must be directed toward genuine love for God and others as Christ loves. Some Synod delegates have argued in favor of changing Church teaching and practice with regard to the Sacrament of Holy Orders, worthiness for Holy Communion, sexual morality and other areas. But it’s hard to see how any such proposals would be consistent with loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and loving our neighbor in truth. Jesus showed us real love by dying to take away our sins. We wouldn’t be loving others as he has loved us if, instead of helping others to repent and believe, we essentially blessed and enabled their sins. The fierce two-fold love to which Jesus calls us in the Gospel is the goal of the Church and, therefore, must be the goal of the Synod. As the first phase of the Synod concludes this Sunday, we pray that this will be the fruits.
• This two-fold commandment of love finds its highest expression in the Eucharist. Pope Benedict mentioned this when he said, “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.”
• 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.

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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