Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 2, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
November 2, 2024

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, as we participate in the dialogue between the Lord Jesus and a scribe — basically a Scripture professor with a specialty in Mosaic law — about the “first of all the commandments.”
• Jesus’ answer to the scribe’s question is well-known to us. Quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps the most famous passage of the Hebrew Bible, he said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” (see Deut 6:4-5) Then he volunteered what he thought was the second of all 613 commandments the Scribes had enumerated in what we now call the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” taken from the Book of Leviticus (19:18), before concluding by saying, “There is no other commandment greater than these.” Upon hearing Jesus’ answer, the scribe exclaimed, “Well said, teacher!,” and expressed his agreement that loving God and neighbor is “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices,” worth more, in other words, than all of the other worship given to God in the temple. The worship that is most important, the priority we should have in our relationship with God, is to love God and to love our neighbor with everything we have. Jesus concludes the conversation by saying to the scribe, somewhat curiously, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Through his understanding, in other words, he was close to the kingdom but not yet in it. Why? In St. Luke’s Gospel, after a similar conversation with another scholar of the law who had asked, not, “Which is the first of all the commandments?,” but “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” to which the same answer was given about loving God and others, Jesus said to him, “Do this and you will live.” The upshot is that to enter the kingdom, we must do more than know what we need to do, but actually do what we know we need to do.
• And so we need to ask ourselves? Do I really love God? To love God is more than to acknowledge his existence. It means more than to fulfill certain duties to him owe out of justice. It means to be willing to sacrifice for him, willingly, the way we sacrifice readily for anyone we love, like a man in love sacrifices for the woman he wants to be his wife or a mother sacrifices for a beloved child. It means to care about what God cares about. It means to seek to please him as much as we can. Many of us can think our relationship with God is fine if, basically, we love the Lord with “most of our heart,” with “some of our mind,” with a “little of our strength,” and with the “majority of our soul.” As long as we’re not committing mortal sins, we tell ourselves, as long as we’re not betraying God, or angry at him, or despising him, or doing anything evil against him, then things are basically fine in our relationship. Or we can think that we love the Lord simply because we have good thoughts about him, admire him, think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently, the good of the other for the other’s sake. Love is opting as a habit to give ourselves for another, putting someone else ahead of us, like Jesus would say during the Last Supper and put into action the following afternoon: laying down one’s life for one’s friends, in little ways or supremely. There are many solid Christians who love God to the point of making sacrifices for him, but as this Sunday’s Gospel shows us, it’s not enough to sacrifice some of the time and gifts that he’s given us for him and his glory. It’s not enough to give God some of our mind, heart, soul and strength. Jesus is calling us to love God in deeds and affection with all we’ve got.
• And so we need to get practical.
  • Jesus calls us to love him with all our mind. How much of our mind do we dedicate to God? Do we try to think as God thinks in our decisions? Do we truly fill our minds with his thoughts through prayer and reading the Bible and good spiritual books or do we fill them with the world’s thoughts through reading the news more than the Bible or surfing the internet or watching television more than we pray?
  • Jesus likewise calls us to love him with all our heart. Do we really love God more than we love everything and everyone else in our life? Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel that we’re not fit to be his disciple unless we love him more than our family members, more than our stuff, more than even our own life. This is obviously challenging but do we try to love him with all our heart?
  • He calls us to love him with all our strength. How much effort do we make to love him? Do we battle through distractions in prayer? Do we prioritize Mass, adoration and time with him in prayer, making the effort to get there, especially during times when it is challenging to do so? When we do attend, do we give it 100 percent to try to pay attention?
  • He calls us to love him with all our soul. That means he wants us full of grace. Do we seek to stay free of all sin or do we compromise with sin and give in to gossip, complaining, holding grudges and the like? Do we take advantage of the opportunities for the Sacrament of Confession so that whatever in our soul is not of God can be forgiven?
• Jesus also calls us to love our neighbor. The love we have for God will be shown by our love for those whom he loves.
  • And so we likewise can ask whether we are striving to love our neighbor with our mind: are we thinking about our neighbor, trying to understand our neighbor and to lead our neighbor to God through the neighbor’s own categories? Do we think good things about others, noticing their good points rather than their weaknesses, giving them the benefit of the doubt rather than thinking the worst.
  • Do we love our neighbor with our heart? Do we only half-love, trying to keep appearances of loving while inside not loving with mercy and understanding for the things in our neighbor we don’t appreciate? Do we love our neighbor with affection, including those who are difficult to love, and making the effort to care for the wounds of their heart.
  • Do we strive to love our neighbor with our strength? Are we sacrificing for our neighbors and going the extra mile to help them with deeds? Do we summon the strength to forgive them?
  • Finally do we love our neighbor with our soul? Since when we’re in the state of grace, God is in our soul, do we strive to love our neighbor together with God? Do we care in a special way for their souls, that they be full of God?
• I think most of us, hearing these questions, will recognize we have a lot of work to do. But Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own. He can command us to love because he loves us first. He pours his love into our hearts so that it may overflow into our mind, will, emotions, soul and muscles. He enters into us so that, together with him from the inside, we may love our neighbor as he has loved us first. He makes it simpler for us: allowing us to love God in him and to love him in our neighbor, promising that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, he takes personally. In short, he makes it possible for us, through love, to enter his kingdom, to do what he teaches and live. But we need to keep before us the challenge he gives us, to love, to give, to sacrifice for God and for others.
• This consequential conversation about the two most important things we need to do is a fitting context to consider as we begin this month of November. On Friday, we celebrated All Saints Day in which we not only remembered the famous heroes of our faith as well as the humble “saints next door” and of our families who have made the eternal Hall of Fame. All Saints Day, and the month of November, is also a time for us to ponder that we, too, are called to sanctity. There are various ways we can define holiness, but one of the best is that holiness is the “perfection of love.” Sanctity means loving God with all we’ve got and loving our neighbor with the love of God. In St. Luke’s Gospel, as I mentioned a little earlier, the scribe asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” We could rephrase the question as “What must I do to become a saint?” To move from “not being far from the kingdom of God” to entering into the kingdom of heaven, is to love as Jesus describes. And so it’s important for us to focus on the love we put into our life, into living our faith.
• At Mass on All Saints Day, Jesus proclaimed to us the beatitudes. We know them. But we can examine whether we love God and others in putting them into practice. Do we love God and others so much that we are poor in spirit, devaluing the things of this world because we treasure God and sharing what we have with those who need it more than we do? Do we love God and others to the point of mourning whenever others are suffering and seek to comfort them with the consolation we have received from God? Do we love God and others enough to become meek, gentle, and humble before them, rather than try to affirm ourselves and our rights and our strength? Do we love God and others to hunger and thirst for holiness, for justice, for a right relationship with God and others, and to be passionate to remedy any injustice against God and others? Do we love God enough to become merciful like he is merciful and readily forgive and reconcile with others 70 times 7 times? Do we love God and others to be pure of heart, to be chaste, and see God in others, refusing ever to use them for our pleasure or needs? Do we love God and others enough to be called children of God by seeking peace rather than strife, even putting our own lives and risk to restore harmony to war torn areas? Do we love God and others enough to be persecuted in witness to our Christian faith, to be cancelled, to be insulted, mocked and calumniated?
• The path to heaven, the path to sanctity, is a path of love. Jesus indicates it to us in the conversation he has with the scribe in the Gospel that he wants us to have with each of us this Sunday. And to help us on the road to sanctity through love, he gives us himself, in his body and blood. In preparation, let us ask him to help us to pray Mass with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to be strengthened by Jesus on the inside, by means of Holy Communion, to “do this in memory of” him, giving our bodies, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our mind, heart, soul and strength for the good of others as Jesus has given all he had for us and our salvation. This is the path so that on future November first, others will be praying through our intercession and seeking to follow our truly Christian, indeed, holy example.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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