Homily for the 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, November 3, 2024. Gospel of St. Mark 22:28-34. Theme: Love Divine All Loves Excelling
It’s so appropriate that we are hearing today’s Gospel about the Great Commandment of Love right after having celebrated All Saints Day on November 1, because holiness, that is, sainthood, is 100% all about love. Or more precisely, it’s about the purification and perfection of love in our lives. But as you know, love is a word that we throw around a lot. We use it in so many different ways to describe our feelings about so many different kinds of things, from the sublime to the mundane. Our free and easy use of the word can make it challenging for any of us to precisely define what we mean by it.
So, I started doing some research about it in the lives of the saints because they are our all-stars in our endeavor to love. 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. Why? Because He is the Love Divine All Loves Excelling (as one of our hymns puts it) who became flesh precisely to show us what it looks like for a human being to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves. What this means is that if we want to learn how to love in our everyday lives then we need to turn to the example of Jesus. This was precisely what every single one of the saints did.
Now of course,
I’m not talking here about a literal imitation of Christ. And the New Testament doesn’t expect us to “mimic” Him in that sense either. Rather we are urged to become like Jesus - or as St. Paul puts it, to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14) - which means to take on His attitude, to absorb the sentiments of His heart, and to look to Him and learn from Him as our most important role model. And this is exactly what every single one of the saints did no matter who they were or when or where they lived. So often when the stories of the saints are retold, we get a mistaken idea that they always were perfect in every way and some few were even as children. 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!
More than just a few of them had originally been greedy business people, conniving ladder-climbers, hedonistic self-seekers, crooked politicians, convicted criminals or corrupt clergy. But, at some point in their lives they had a deeply profound spiritual experience of the love of Jesus Christ and that’s when everything began to change for them. 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. The trajectories of their varied lives 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 being transformed by love: the Gospels and the Eucharist.
The Gospels are vital for modeling ourselves after the pattern of Jesus Christ because where else would we go to learn about Him? All four editions of the Gospel hand on to us what Jesus really did and said when he lived on planet Earth. And then the other texts of the New Testament, mostly those written by St. Paul, take up where the Gospels leave off and help us to actually put into practice what we learn in the Gospels. This is the reason why Pope Francis frequently urges us to read and really ponder the Gospels and allow ourselves to be formed by them. Unlike ordinary human literature, the Scriptures have the power of God within them and this power which we call “grace” can reach deep down inside us to touch, soften our hearts, and teach us how to love.
And as for the importance of the Holy Eucharist in our efforts of becoming more like Jesus, well that just makes total sense to me! 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? He enters into us and if we welcome Him with truly open and sincere hearts, He can get to work in changing us from the inside out! The more we receive Christ with intentional faith and conscious devotion, the more we can open ourselves up to Him and the more He can love others through us. This is why the saints were profoundly committed to receiving the Eucharist frequently. Each one of them knew that without Christ living in them, they were just one step away from becoming again what they once used to be.
By turning to Jesus in the Gospels and the Eucharist, we can more easily and readily make the sentiments of his Sacred Heart our own. And this will enable us to make love more real and effective in tangible ways in our everyday lives, which is after all, the very goal of the Christian life. This isn’t easy, but it is possible by the grace of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who leads and empowers us. We need to be more conscious of His Divine Presence within us and more aware of what an astounding power this gives us! Let’s learn to hold our hands out to Him every morning and pray, “Holy Spirit of Love, come, visit and fill me. Make me more like Jesus by helping me to hear and follow Your holy inspirations. Amen.”
