Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions

June 3, 2021

1 Tob 6:10-11.7:1.9-17.8:4-9, Ps 128, Mk 12:28-34

 

To listen to a recording of this morning’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.3.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Over the last three days all of the major groups of Jewish society had come to Jesus to test him, and even trap him, with tough questions. On Tuesday, the strict Pharisees and lax Herodians conspired to try to trip Jesus up on the question of whether it was lawful to pay the census tax. Yesterday, the elitist Sadducees came to get him on the question of the Resurrection of the dead. Today the last of the major groups, the Scribes, came up to him to ask him which was the greatest of all the commandments. After Jesus’ answer today, St. Mark tells us, “No one dared to ask him any more questions.”

* We’ve heard the answer to today’s question so many times that its difficulty is not always obvious. There were 613 commandments in the Old Covenant. To ask which of them was the greatest was required not only great familiarity with all of Sacred Scripture — something that the scribes had and very few others had — but also great synthesis to discover what in the Old Covenant had the greatest weight of all. As we see throughout the Gospels, the Scribes, Pharisees and many others didn’t have a great sense of the hierarchy of truths, about prioritizing what was most important of all. They often focused far more on how they’d wash their hands, pots and jugs than how to love their neighbor, straining out gnats, to use Jesus’ image that we’ll be hearing about in the next few weeks beginning Monday with the Sermon on the Mount, than avoiding swallowing camels. Jesus, however, answered the question about the most important thing we need to do and then offered a second, which is allied to it, in such a way that the scribe who had asked the question was truly impressed. For us, today, we need to ponder Jesus’ response and what that means in our life.

* The first and the greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” It was to love the Lord not only with part of ourselves, but all of ourselves. So often we can think everything 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.” But Jesus wants everything. And deserves everything. But how can Jesus command us to love? Can anyone be compelled to love or forced to love from the outside? Isn’t that inconsistent with what love is? It would be impossible to command to love if love were just a feeling, because we can’t be commanded to feel something. But love is fundamentally a choice, it’s an act of willing, it’s something in which our freedom is engaged. Jesus can command us to love God with all we are because God gives us himself to help us precisely to love to that degree. He commands and at the same time makes fulfilling the command possible. Pope Benedict took up this question in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, saying, “love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given.”

* And to keep that commandment to love God with all we are, we need to let that love overflow into two other forms of love, the authentic love of ourselves and the love of our neighbor as we authentically love ourselves. If we love God and God loves us, then we must love ourselves as God loves us, helped of course by God’s own love. Jesus insists in his Last Supper discourse that the F...