Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska, Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, Bl. Bartolo Longo

October 5, 2020

Gal 1:6-12, Ps 111, Lk 10:25-37

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On Saturday, in a prayer to God the Father, Jesus contrasted the “wise and the clever” from those who accept the Kingdom like like children. Today in the Gospel, we meet one of those who is “wise and clever.” A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe from his study of the law what he thinks the answer is. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus would give elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized the struggle for this scribe would have to put into practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere curiosity, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach him who really loves his neighbor, before adding, “Go and do the same.”

* Jesus changed the way that the Scribe (and the people of the time) looked at loving our neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not our neighbor that we should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to being willing to love and treat with mercy whomever we meet. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. That’s what it means to become a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us with all our wounds every morning. He wants us to follow him in loving like this.

* Insofar as we, too, need not just to love God with all we are but to become Good Samaritans to all in order to inherit eternal life, it’s important for us to enter more deeply into this parable of Jesus. Jesus describes a mugged man left in a ditch dying. A priest and a Levite journey by that route — two people who were religious, who should have been living by God’s command to love their neighbor — but, seeing the dying man, pass by the other side. Perhaps they were late for an appointment at the temple. Perhaps they didn’t want to become ritually impure by touching the man’s blood,