Friday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time II
August 21, 2026 – Memorial of Saint Pius X, Pope
Hello and welcome to the Word, bringing you the Good News of Jesus Christ every day from the Redemptorists of the Baltimore Province. I am Fr. Karl Esker from the Basilica of our Lady of Perpetual Help in Brooklyn, NY. Today is Friday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time and the Memorial of Pope Saint Pius X.
Today’s reading is taken from the holy gospel according to Matthew.
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
The gospel of the Lord.
Homily
We live in a horrible world where the idea of human decency has been abolished by our political and business classes, because it might put limits on their power and self enrichment. We cannot turn on the TV or surf the Internet without encountering scenes warfare and civil strife. Our homes, schools, and places of worship, our stores and businesses and even our parks and streets are not safe from mass shootings and knifings. Our whole world drips with the blood of the innocent. Even nature seems to have turned against us with deadly earthquakes, fires, storms and floods. It is no wonder that so many people today are struggling with despair and hope is hard to come by.
That also was the world of the prophet Ezekiel in the land of Babylon, as he listened to his exiled people’s cry: “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost.” But God gave Ezekiel a message for his people: “Thus says the Lord GOD: O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them. ... I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land; thus you shall know that I am the LORD. I have promised, and I will do it, says the LORD.”
And God kept his promise. God will not save us from the consequences of our foolish sinfulness, but God will never abandon us nor forget his love for us. Jesus is the incarnation of that love, yet even he was rejected by the civil and religious leaders of his day. We see that in today’s gospel, where, after Jesus escapes the trap of the Sadducees, the Pharisees try to lay another, asking him which is the greatest of the commandments. We all know his answer: Love God above all things and one’s neighbor as oneself. Both are intimately connected, easy to understand, but so difficult to fulfill.
To truly understand them, we must develop a real consciousness of God’s love for us and then recognize that love is not a feeling, but an action. We who believe must bring the love of God and love of neighbor back into a society that has forgotten them. It is difficult, because we are going to cross paths with some unlikeable characters into whom we may want to shake some sense; but that will not work. We find them in our families, at the workplace and in society; and we have to learn to control our anger and treat them well, or at least wish them well. Maybe we can say a little prayer like: Bless them, Lord; and have mercy on me.
We cannot change the world by being like the world. Jesus went to his death on the cross asking God the Father to forgive his executioners, because they did not know what they were doing. He
had complete confidence that God would raise him up. And on the third day, Jesus rose from the dead.
We need that same confidence in the love that God has for us. It is the only thing that can keep us from despair. And we must keep striving to love our neighbor, helping one another in our difficulties, seeing the good that each is capable of, and defending the good by encouraging one another for the good, because that is the only way to defeat the evil we see around us. If we persevere, the God of love will see us through. As God told the prophet Ezekiel: “I have promised, and I will do it.
May God bless you.
Fr. Karl E. Esker CSsR
Basilica of our Lady of Perpetual Help
Brooklyn, NY
