Homily for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, October 31, 2021. Gospel of St. Mark 22:28-34. Theme: All That Matters is Love
It’s so appropriate that we are hearing today’s Gospel about the Great Commandment of Love as we prepare to celebrate All Saints Day on Monday, November 1. Because holiness, sainthood, is 100% all about love. But as you know, love is a word that we speak so easily and throw around a lot in the English language. We use it in so many different ways and about so many different kinds of things that it can be hard to explain just exactly what we mean by it.
So, I started doing some research about it in the lives of the saints. And in doing so, I discovered that instead of describing or defining love, they simply tell us that it looks and acts like Jesus of Nazareth. And you know, that makes a lot of sense to me because the Scriptures inform us that God is love and that Jesus was this God of love present among us in visible bodily form. So, this means that if we want to know how to love, if we want to learn how to practice love in what we say and what we do, then we need to turn to the example of Jesus.
Now of course his life was very different from ours, so we’re not talking about a literal imitation of Christ. But to become like Jesus - or as St. Paul puts it, to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” - means to take on his attitude, to get into the sentiments of his heart, and to look up to him as our most important role model. And this is exactly what every single one of the saints did. So often when the stories of the saints are told, we get a mistaken idea that they always were perfect in every way. But honestly, nothing could be further from the truth. Because the reality is that they were just like you and me and many of them started off even worse than we are in many ways!
Most of them were ordinary everyday Christians with their fair share of triumphs and struggles, joys and sorrows, good days and bad days. But we can also find among them those who were drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers and thieves. More than just a few had originally been greedy business people, conniving lawyers, crooked politicians, or corrupt clergy.
Here I tell brief stories about St. Vincent de Paul, St. Philip Howard, and St. Mary of Egypt.
They are available only on the audio version of this reflection.
But, at some point in their lives, every saint, no matter who they were or what they were, encountered Jesus Christ up close and personal in some dynamic way. And that’s when everything began to change. Bit by bit, day by day, the heart of Jesus, the mind of Jesus, the outlook of Jesus began to be gradually formed within each and every one of them. They show us that the power of God’s grace can turn a person around from being a skeptic into a believer, from living the lifestyle of a sinner into that of a saint. And their conversion experiences teach us that two things are indispensable in this process of transformation: the Gospels and the Eucharist.
It makes a lot of sense to me that the Gospels are vital for the modeling of ourselves after Jesus Christ because where else would we go to learn about him? All four of the Gospels hand on to us what Jesus really did and said when he lived on planet Earth. And then the other books of the New Testament take up the task where the Gospels leave off and help us to actually put into practice what we learn in the Gospels. Just this morning at his Mass, Pope Francis said this very same thing in his homily. He urged Catholics to read, reread, and be passionate about the Gospel because when we do this Jesus, the Word of the Father, enters into our hearts, he becomes intimate with us and we bear fruit in Him.
What he is saying is that when we read the Scriptures with faith, and that's the key - with faith - they have the power to change us if we allow it because, unlike ordinary human literature, they have the power of God within them. God’s Word can reach down inside us to touch and soften even the most selfish of hearts. For example, the once-egotistical and extremely-hedonistic St. Augustine was converted to Christ after 30 years of wayward living by simply reading and pondering just one verse from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans.
And as for the importance of the Holy Eucharist, well that makes total sense to me as well! I mean, how can we hope to grow in love if we don’t go as often as we can to receive the God of Love, who is truly present in Holy Communion? The more we receive Christ the more we become like him and the more he can love others through us. This is why the saints found any way they could to receive the Eucharist frequently. Each of them knew that without Christ living in them, they were just one step away from becoming again what they used to be. I know that on those days when I cannot receive the Lord in Holy Communion, I really feel the lack of spiritual strength within me. I find it more challenging at those times to love God and others as well as I should.
The great mystic, St. John of the Cross, tells us that when we finally come before God at the end of our earthly lives, the only thing that will matter to him is how much and how well we have loved. In other words, our eternity will depend upon how much and how well we have sought to become more and more like Jesus in this life, so that we can enter the Kingdom of God to be with him and those we love forever in the next.
St. Philip Howard
St. Mary of Egypt
No comments:
Post a Comment