The Sacramentalization of the Church’s Charity, 27th Monday (II), October 8, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
20th Anniversary of My Diaconal Ordination
October 8, 2018
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: 

• A couple of days ago, in a prayer to God the Father, Jesus contrasted the “wise and the clever” from those who accept the Kingdom like like children. Today in the Gospel, we meet one of those who is “wise and clever.” 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 “child molester” or “mobster” or “ISIS member.” 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. When we ponder with faith and real love Jesus’ suffering, when we see his scourge marks, when we look at the nail marks and his bleeding head and bloody eyes, we become Veronicas and Simons of Cyrene. Then we’re able to see Christ in the distressing disguise of those who likewise are beaten down by the world, who are hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need (Mt 25:31-46). And we draw near to care for the One who drew near to care for us.
• This message about the Church’s becoming a Kingdom of Good Samaritans is a very good reminder for me today on the twentieth anniversary of my Diaconal Ordination at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. To be a deacon is to exercise the charity of a Good Samaritan. Pope John Paul II said in Detroit in 1987, “The service of the deacon is the Church’s service sacramentalized.” He said it is meant to be the driving force of the Church’s diakonia, or service to those in need. Deacons are configured to Christ the servant and are meant to be living signs of the Church’s servanthood. We see this in Sacred Scripture. When the Apostles no longer had the time to wait on tables and ensure that none in need was going without, especially widows, they ordained deacons so that the apostles would be able to dedicate themselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. This was not because charity was less important than preaching, prayer or the sacraments; that’s because it was too important to neglect. “The exercise of charity became established as one of her essential activities, along with the administration of the sacraments and the proclamation of the word: love for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind, is as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel. The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word.” For this essential task, hey didn’t just find some social workers or waiters, but prayed to God and chose men “filled with the Holy Spirit and with wisdom,” men who knew more than merely what to do at a practical level but also who acted according to God’s inspiration. That’s what deacons are always called to do. That’s what priests and bishops, who are deacons first, must always do, because diaconal ordination — charitable service — is at the foundation of their presbyteral and episcopal ordinations.
• As St. Paul will teach us in his letter to the Galatians over the course of the next nine weekdays, God always supplies the grace we need to live up to everything to which he calls us. He calls us not to forsake the Gospel Christ has announced to us for “another Gospel,” not to water down the call, not to pretend as if we can just love those we choose to be our neighbors, not 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. 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.

The readings for today’s Mass were: