Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 24, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
October 24, 2020

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will speak to us about the single most important thing we need to do in life. If we do everything else but don’t do this, we will not have lived life well. If we do this but don’t get to everything else, we will still have passed the test of life with flying colors.
• The consequential conversation happens after a lawyer asks Jesus, “What is the greatest of all the commandments?.” We’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times that we can think that the question was a soft ball, but it was really a 100 mph slider. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest was something that the scholars of the law had found difficult 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.” 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 makes clear that it’s not enough to love God only with some, 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.
• But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited. He knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many people would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the simple fact that we acknowledge him, revere him and have feelings of affection and gratitude 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. Jesus said 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 is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. Jesus during the Last Supper would set his love up as a model for our love. No longer would our love for ourselves be the standard for the love of our neighbor, but his love for us would be the standard: “Love one another as I have loved you!” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). When he 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 care. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?,” the neighbor 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 money, time and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John, 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).
• 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 the calling we have received. I have found this one 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. We can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some can claim, especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality and 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? 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 a law that trains us how to love. Every violation of his 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 for us 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).
• These thoughts about loving God and loving neighbor should impact the way we approach voting on November 3, because voting is meant to express what we value most, and if our vote is not a concretization of this two-fold command of love of neighbor, what else is it expressing?
• But the application I’d like to give is to really big news in the Catholic Church happening on Saturday as Fr. Michael McGivney, a parish priest of the Archdiocese of Hartford who founded the Knights of Columbus and died in 1884, will become be beatified in Connecticut. He was an “ordinary” parish priest for 13 years who, without fanfare, sought to love God with all he had and to love his neighbor. He wasn’t a flashy preacher. He was not known for any particular theological brilliance. He wasn’t a miracle worker in his lifetime. He simply “did his job” with great love for God and others, regularly opting for the toughest assignments like visiting death-row inmates.

• Soon after his ordination, when he was a parochial vicar, a tragedy happened to one of the families at St. Mary’s in New Haven where he was assigned. One of his parishioners, Edward Downes, died of what the doctors called “brain fever.” For years, Downes had struggled to keep his newsstand viable, while cheerfully concealing all financial difficulties from his growing family. Upon his death, his wife Catherine discovered that there was no money at all to support her four sons. That meant, according to the practices of the time, that the Probate Court could assign the children to public institutions lest they be neglected for want of money. Catherine Downes had to demonstrate that her fatherless children had someone to support their education or apprenticeship and prevent them from becoming vagrants. The oldest son was able to get a job and Catherine’s relatives were able to scrape together $2,500 for each of the two youngest sons. But no guardian was able to be found willing to pay a $1,500 surety and become Alfred’s guardian. During the probate court hearing to determine his fate, the judge asked if anyone would be willing to become his guardian. Fr. McGivney stepped forward. Even though he didn’t have the money for the bond, the judge accepted an arrangement with a local grocer who trusted the priest enough to insure the guardianship.
• Fr. McGivney saved Alfred Downes from going to a public institution that day, but the 31-year old priest’s eyes were opened to the danger to which families were exposed should their breadwinner be injured or die. He began to pour his pastoral heart and energy into trying to find a solution. And that solution led to the founding of the Knights of Columbus, to form men in practical ways to love God and to love their neighbors, especially those like Edward, Catherine and Alfred Downes. Now the Knights have 1.9 million members in 17 different countries. One man’s practical love has become a worldwide movement. His beatification is an opportunity for all of us to reflect on what he was able to do in his 38 years to spread love of God and neighbor and what we might do in ours.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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