Made BY Love, Made FOR Love

 

Deacon David Previtali · MADE BY LOVE, MADE FOR LOVE

Homily for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, October 25, 2020. Gospel of St. Matthew 22:34-40. Theme: Made By Love, Made For Love 

Every significant world religion has a particular passage taken from their holy books which expresses who they are as a people; a kind of “mission statement” of their community spirit. The mission statement of Judaism, for example, is called the Shema, and it is taken from the Old Testament Book of the Law. It says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus takes the Shema and adds to it another passage from the Old Testament that says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” They had never been combined like this before and he makes this new commandment of double-love the mission statement of his disciples. Just as Christianity is the fulfilment of Judaism, so the new Great Commandment of Double Love is the completion of the Shema, bringing love of God to its fulfilment by making it inseparable from love of our neighbor. 

So, that’s all well and good as far as knowing what our mission statement is and where it comes from. But more importantly we need to know WHY it is our primary identification as Christians. And the reason is this: we were - each and every one of us - made BY Love, that is, made by God. And we were - each and every one of us - made to be an image of this divine love. This means that we were - each and every one of us - made BY love and made FOR love. Love, then, is the very reason for our existence. Love is our vocation. It is the very mission of our lives no matter who or what we are. 

Now I think this should make us ask: what exactly is this kind of love? What does it look like? In reply, the teachings of the Church and the experience of the saints, tell us that love looks and acts like Jesus of Nazareth. And to help us better understand this, they place before us the devotion to the Heart of Jesus which we Catholics have cherished for centuries. I am sure you have all seen images of the Sacred Heart, afire with love for God and for us sinners, pierced with the thorns of sorrow for suffering humanity, surmounted by the cross of self-giving without limits. The Sacred Heart is a word-picture of Christian love that should be our model and inspiration as we strive to live out the mission of Christianity. 

To effectively carry out this mission of love, our hearts must also be on fire with love for God and neighbor, our hearts must also be pierced by the thorns of compassion for those who suffer, and our hearts must also be affixed to the cross of self-forgetfulness. This was the way of Jesus, the way of the Gospel. And it must be our way if we truly want to love. But we might say, “this seems impossible for us!” And it is, that is, unless and until we allow the grace of God to transform us by the power of the Holy Spirit. How this transformation happens - and it must keep happening daily - is that the Heart of Jesus, his sentiments and motivation, are spiritually transplanted into each and every one of us so that eventually we can truly say with St. Paul the Apostle, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20). 

This spiritual heart transplant is a mystical wonder of Christianity. Through baptism we become so closely united with Jesus, linked to him inseparably by grace, that he re-lives his life, so to speak, through each and every one of us. Not in some New-Age channeling kind of way, but really and truly in a supernatural way. Jesus the Beloved Son of the Father walks and ministers again and again on planet Earth through each and every one of us who are baptized and living in grace. How awesome is that?! 

It is the Holy Spirit who brings all this about. He is the divine surgeon of this operation of grace. And the two instruments he uses for this transformation are the Gospels and the Eucharist. These are the primary ways in which our hearts gradually become supplanted with the Heart of Jesus. For how can we learn to become like Jesus if we do not frequently read and reflect on at least a little bit of the Gospels? And how can we hope to overcome our innate human selfishness if we do go as often as we can to the Eucharist so that the Risen Lord is truly living and loving in us and through us? Through the Gospels and the Eucharist our minds and our hearts are gradually changed, bit by bit, day by day, so that we begin to think with the mind of Jesus and to love with the Heart of Jesus. 

All of this is why the Great Commandment is the mission statement, the very heart and soul of Christianity. This is why the inspired writings of the New Testament and of the great mystics, such as St. John of the Cross, tell us that when we finally come before God at the end of our earthly lives, the only thing that will matter for our judgment is how much and how well we have loved, how much and how well we have become more and more like Jesus.