Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 28, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
October 28, 2023

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 the Scribes and Pharisees co-conspired to test Jesus by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?.” 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 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 it a little. He uses heart, soul and mind, stressing, it seems, to love God with their mind, rather than use their mind to conspire, among things, 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 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, a twist the scholar of the law didn’t expect. Jesus 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. And this was particularly an issue for his interlocutor who thought he loved God while he was trying to trip up Jesus, the one in front of him. 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 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 your mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like you would the love of God. During the Last Supper, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even clearer. There he said, 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 ourselves be the standard for the love of our neighbor, but his love for us would be the standard. 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 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 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 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 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).
• I’d like to make two quick applications from Jesus’ consequential conversation with us in the Gospel. 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. As we focus on God’s will for us, our sanctification, this week, it’s a time to make real resolutions to prioritize the love of God with all our heart in prayer and the sacraments, with all our mind in sacred study, with all our soul by a good confession, with all our strength by making sacrifices for him. It’s a time, likewise, to commit ourselves to loving our neighbor the way God loves us, starting with the most proximate neighbors, our family members.
• The second application is to the Synod on Synodality, the first phase of which is concluding in the Vatican on Sunday. 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, about worthiness for Holy Communion, or about sexual morality. But it’s hard to see how any of these proposals would be consistent with loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, or loving our neighbor if we would look the other way if they live in a way diametrically opposed to the Gospel. 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.
• As we prepare for Sunday Mass, let’s ask God for the grace to love him in the Eucharist with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and to help us through communion to learn how to love our neighbor by that same Eucharistic standard. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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