Homily for 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the
4th Sunday
in Ordinary TimeJan. 29, 2006
Collect
Christian Bros., Iona

This weekend I preached (at St. Vincent’s Hospital) without a written text. Here’s an “oldie” for The Eastern Front’s readers.

“Lord our God, help us to love you with all our hearts and to love all men as you love them” (Collect). [In the new, more literal translation: “Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind, and love everyone in truth of heart.”]

Our opening prayer this evening echoes Jesus’ teaching of the 2 great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors—except that, in a bit of a twist, we pray not that we may love our neighbors as ourselves but as God loves them. That would seem to raise the bar more than a little.

We take it for granted that God loves all persons, even persons we wouldn’t consider lovable. We also take it for granted that we’re incapable of loving as God does: completely, unconditionally, so powerfully that our love might even purify and transform another. At its best, the sacrament of marriage images Christ’s love for us, his body, the Church, when a husband and wife come close to loving each other as God does. At its best, religious life leads us toward such a love for one another in our own communities.

But it’s always a struggle, isn’t it—in community; in marriages especially at their beginning, and often thruout? More so, in our dealings with all those persons beyond our religious or marital families.

What does it mean for us as religious to love all persons as God loves them? What does it mean for us as educators?

At Mass on Friday we heard the familiar story of David’s adultery and murder (2 Sam 11:1-17). The greatest of Israel’s kings was exemplifying the worst of the arrogance of power that Samuel had warned the people about when they 1st demanded a king (1 Sam 8:10-18). So many the stories of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, or the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandals (if you remember that far back), or the alleged thieveries of Msgr. Woolsey down in Manhattan offer us contemporary examples of the arrogance of power. Any of us who exercise power in community, in ministry, in an office, or in a classroom are susceptible to it—usually not to adultery or murder, but easily enuf to favoritism, to disdain of those who disagree with us, to the misuse of assets. If we’re fortunate, we’ll have a prophet Nathan to call us to account like David, and like David will respond in repentance (2 Sam 12:1-17). More fortunate still if we exercise our authority as superior, administrator, pastor, or teacher in the manner of Jesus, who came to serve, not to be served; that is, to love.

On a more personal level, most of us, probably all of us, have experienced what David did when he looked on Bathsheba. It isn’t divine love, is it? We’re all susceptible to lust, to looking selfishly upon other persons as objects to serve our pleasure. Obviously, Christ calls us to a higher standard, and so does our profession of chastity. Fittingly, we pray to God for his help in responding to Christ: “Lord our God, help us to love all persons as you love them”—purely.

A variation on seeing persons as objects: Probably all of us know someone who, when he calls, the 1st thing in our minds is, “What does he want me to do for him now?” There are people who are experts at using other people but never assisting others, always taking and never giving. “Lord our God, help us to love all persons as you love them”—disinterestedly.

As great a challenge, maybe even greater, as loving others with a quasi-divine love in community and from our own hearts is to teach others to do so. That challenge we accepted when we became educators. I gnash my teeth when I consider the distinguished Catholic politicians who graduated Catholic schools and went on to promote abortion rights, same sex marriage, embryonic stem cell research. (Truth in advertising, so to speak: The president of the Massachusetts State Senate [Bobby Travaglini], a Ted Kennedy Democrat thru and thru, is one of our alumni.) How could Catholic educators have failed so miserably to teach the Gospel?

It is a plus, of course, when our graduates stand authentically for the poor and the oppressed, whether in our inner cities, in the Third World, or in transit across our borders. They are following the teaching of our Savior, then. In the words of Pope Benedict, “God makes the choice to align himself in defense of the weak, the victims,” a choice that is “made known to all governments, to all of us that we, too, must know which side to choose… that of the humble, the least, the poor and weak.”[1] That concern—concretely applying it, e.g., to the elderly, the sick, the homeless, refugees, those who speak a different language or are of a different color, the inhabitants of the barrios and favelas of the world—is rooted in the God-given human dignity of the human person; in other words, in loving persons as God loves them.

Such concern must extend also to bioethical issues, such as assisted suicide, euthanasia, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, abortion. As one op-ed columnist wrote last Monday with reference to the March for Life, “humans are the images of God, regardless of what they can or cannot produce for the economy, what they look like, how they act. . . . Each man and woman is so unique, so capable, so intrinsically close to God that doing violence to a fellow man, killing and even aborting, can never be acceptable.”[2]

Some Salesian students at 2008 March for Life. (Photo: Fr. Abe Feliciano)

The same day a syndicated columnist wrote of assisted suicide: “The morality of care for the sick and aging in our society bears witness to how we see ourselves and the world we want our children to inhabit. How we answer this question tells us more about how we live than how we die, and tells us literally, who cares. We once depended on religion and laws of the spirit to determine how we put science and technology to use. That’s difficult today when secularism has been elevated to the status of religion, reality has become virtual and technology drives our sensibilities about what it means to be human.”[3]

I listed in vitro fertilization above along with more obviously destructive actions. Why? The Vatican instruction on the question in 1987 notes that every person deserves to be created by a human act of love and not by a laboratory procedure.[4] Just as every human act of love must be open to life —the teaching of Humanae vitae—so must every creation of life result from love. In plainer terms, producing human life in a lab is a 1st huge step toward turning life into a commodity to be manufactured. Indeed, there have already been several news stories of persons being conceived—artificially or naturally—as potential organ donors for their siblings. If that’s not using a human being as a commodity, I don’t know what is. It’s certainly not “loving all persons as God loves them.” Another, unavoidable issue resulting from IVF is the huge number of fertilized embryos stored unused in labs all over the world—and now the target of proposals for destructive stem cell research.

How do we convey to our students the fundamental humanity—because humans are made in the image of God and not of Dr. Frankenstein—of loving one another as God loves us rather than as science or technology loves us? That, fundamentally, is what your congregation and mine are about, Brothers. If we succeed at that, then we have indeed succeeded in our apostolic ministry. If we fail, then the number of accountants, MBAs, athletes, doctors, scientists, or whatever who come from our schools won’t matter much. For, in the end, “faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13).

[1] General audience, Dec. 7: CNS news brief, 12/7/05.
[2] John Carey, “Why they march,” Washington Times, 1/23/06.
[3] Suzanne Fields, “When society celebrates suicide,” Washington Times, 1/23/06.
[4] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day,” 2/22/87.