Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

October 30, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.30.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we participate in the dialogue between the Lord Jesus and a scribe — basically a Scripture professor with a specialty in Mosaic law — about the “first of all the commandments.”

* Jesus’ answer is well-known to us. Quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps the most famous passage of the Hebrew Bible, he replied, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” (see Deut 6:4-5) Then he volunteered what he thought was the second of all 613 commandments the Scribes had enumerated in what we now call the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” taken from the Book of Leviticus (19:18) and concluded by saying, “There is no other commandment greater than these.” Upon hearing Jesus’ answer, the Scribe exclaimed, “Well said, teacher!,” and expressed his agreement that loving God and neighbor is “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices,” worth more, in other words, than all of the other worship giving to God in the temple. The worship that is most important, the priority we should have in our relationship with God, is to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbor. Jesus concludes the conversation by saying to the scribe, somewhat curiously, “You are notfarfrom the kingdom of God.” Through his understanding, in other words, he was closeto the kingdom but not yet in it. Why? In St. Luke’s Gospel, after a similar conversation with another scholar of the law who had asked, not, “Which is the first of all the commandments?,” but “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” after the answer to love God with all we’ve got and to love our neighbor as ourselves, said, “Dothis and you will live.” The upshot is that to enter the kingdom, we must do more than knowwhat we need to do, but actually dowhat we know we need to do.

* And so we need to ask ourselves? Do I really love God? To love God is more than to acknowledge his existence. It means more than to fulfill certain duties to him owe out of justice. It means to be willing to sacrifice for him, willingly, the way we sacrifice readily for anyone we love, like a man in love sacrifices for the woman he wants to be his wife or a mother sacrifices for a beloved child. It means to care about what God cares about. It means to seek to please him as much as we can. Many of us can think our relationship with God 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.” As long as we’re not committing mortal sins, we tell ourselves, as long as we’re not betraying God, or angry at him, or despising him, or doing anything evil against him, then things are basically fine in our relationship. Or we can think that we love the Lord simply because we have good thoughts about him, admire him, think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently,