Homily for 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 13, 2025
Deut 30: 10-14
Collect
Luke 10: 25-37
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

Moses (Library of Congress)

In the 1st reading today, Moses urged the Israelites to “heed the voice of the Lord and keep his commandments”; to “return to the Lord” their God (Deut 30:10).  We prayed in the collect that the light of God’s truth help us who’ve gone astray “return to the right path.”  Those thoughts are linked, as Ps 119 reminds us:  “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (v. 105).

Our path is the one that leads us to heaven, to our eternal home in our Father’s house.  That’s why Christians are a pilgrim people; we’re on a long journey.  It’s easy to get sidetracked by some curiosity or some whim, as travelers often do when they leave the highway; or to lose one’s trail entirely like a hiker in the woods (I can testify to that).  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus cautions us to be careful what gate we enter, what road we follow:  “the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter thru it are many.  How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life.  And those who find it are few” (Matt 7:13-14).

Like the unfortunate traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho in Jesus’ parable, we might even be assaulted on our pilgrimage toward heaven—not by highway robbers but by our own passions for wealth, fame, power, or pleasure, or by the bad example of others who don’t care about God’s truth or his commandments, or give no thought to where life is taking all of us:  which, we know in our hearts, is toward what classic Christian teaching calls the 4 last things:  death, judgment, heaven, or hell.

So Christ’s followers on this pilgrimage need guidance and protection.  “The faith [we] profess” is such guidance, the collect observes.  “The light of [God’s] truth” helps keep us on the right path, pointing out the boundaries of the roadway or obstacles that might trip us.  Jesus’ teaching is our GPS, always pointing us in the right direction.

Both the collect and Moses’ words note that we may go astray and need to return to the Lord our God.  Going astray means sin, choosing to wander off the path God lays out for us.  But returning is always possible; in fact, Christ’s whole purpose was to lead us back to God, to encourage us to repent and get back to “loving the Lord our God with all our heart, all our strength, and all our mind,” to “loving our neighbor as ourselves” (cf. Luke 10:27).  Jesus assures us that if we do that we will live (10:28), i.e., we’ll come safely to the end of our pilgrimage and join him in his Father’s house.

We need to look at the question posed to Jesus:  “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29).  Who is it I’m supposed to love like myself?  Jesus’ answer is the famous parable of the Good Samaritan.  Jews hated Samaritans, and vice versa.  Yet in this parable the Samaritan traveler, not the Jewish priest, not the Jewish levite (a non-priestly temple assistant), proves himself the neighbor to the robbers’ victim, the one who actually does what God’s law commands.  In short, before God everyone is my neighbor.

(by Jan Wijnants)

The homeless person in the subway is my neighbor.  The slow person in front of me in the grocery check-out line is my neighbor.  The jerk who cut me off on the highway is my neighbor.  The store clerk who barely speaks English is my neighbor.  The person who helped our soldiers in Afghanistan and now needs refuge here is my neighbor.  The Ukrainian orphan is my neighbor.  The Haitian who fled his homeland overrun by murderous gangs is my neighbor.  The Asian girl who wants to escape traffickers is my neighbor.  The Central American threatened by narcos is my neighbor.  The Jew contending with anti-Semitism is my neighbor, and so is the Palestinian bombed out of her home in Gaza.  The Sudanese starving because of civil war is my neighbor.  The indigenous Brazilian whose rivers are polluted by illegal miners is my neighbor.

How am I to act as their neighbor?  How am I to walk the right path toward eternal life?