Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
I’m
not as good with sound bites as Bishop Doerfler. I could only keep my homily to four points, not three. But the first and the last one are the
same, so hopefully it’s not too challenging. My four points are: love the person; do not condemn; call to
conversion; love the person. Did
we get that? Love the person; do
not condemn; call to conversion; love the person.
That
is certainly the message of today’s readings, though the Word of God expresses
it better than I do: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we heard the Book of
Leviticus say from our first reading.
First, of course, we must actually love who we are, not with the
egotistical, self-centered, narcissistic love that our culture promotes, but
with the realization that we are created in the image and likeness of God and
so are basically good, even though we suffer under the effects of desiring what
we should not want to do, what we call concupiscence. But if we realize that we are in the image and likeness of
God, then and only then can we treat others like we treat ourselves. Love the person.
The
Gospel continues with Jesus telling us how God loves those who don’t love Him,
and that we are called to the same.
He lets his sun shine on the bad and the good, and lets the rains fall
on the just and the unjust. God
does not condemn the person. He
does not approve of evil or unjust deeds, but He does not condemn the person as
soon as they fall into sin.
Instead, He continues to love them. Do not condemn.
To
what end? Why would God love someone
who has turned away from Him? Why
would God give good things to those who deserve bad? He showers His love on them so that they might be changed by
His love. The cliché way of saying
this is: “God loves us as we are—but too much to let us stay that way.” God loves us even though we turn away
from Him in sin, but His love that He continues to give us is meant to
encourage us to return that love and choose Him rather than sin. Call to conversion.
This
is the part that our society really has a problem with. We’re all too ready to say that God
loves us. We’re all too ready not to
be condemned by God. But when it
comes to conversion, we shrink back.
We have fallen into the error that loving a person means loving
everything that person does. That
is not how God’s love works, and therefore it’s not how our love as followers
of God should work.
Let’s
say I had an evil twin, who was the antithesis of who I am, sort of the Bizarro
Fr. Anthony (if you don’t know Superman, that probably didn’t make sense). And let’s say Bizarro Fr. Anthony is
just a very angry man and his anger overflows one day because McDonald’s just
ran out of the shamrock shake and he didn’t get to enjoy one at all (this is
not a true story, just in case you’re wondering), and so he kills the
McDonald’s employee. Does God
still love Bizarro Fr. Anthony?
Yes!! If God didn’t love
Bizarro Fr. Anthony, Bizarro Fr. Anthony wouldn’t exist. But God does not love the murder that
Bizarro Fr. Anthony just committed, even if McDonald’s did just run out of shamrock shakes. The same goes for any sin with any person. God loves us, but he doesn’t love
everything we do. We, too, can
love the person without loving everything they do. Don’t believe me?
None of
you would probably call Pope Francis a hateful person, full of bigotry. In fact, I would guess that if we had
to come up with one word that described Pope Francis, that word would be:
loving. And yet, in the interview
Pope Francis gave to a Jesuit priest in September, Pope Francis stated that the
Church’s teaching on abortion, gay marriage, and artificial contraception is
clear. Does that mean he does not
love certain people? Of course
not! Pope Francis loves us
all!! And he is an image, an icon,
if you will, of Jesus’ love, which is fitting since he is the Vicar of
Christ. And he is teaching us how
to love a person without loving everything they do. And the key is that we love people, not just at the
beginning, but throughout, even when we disagree with them, even if they do
things with which we cannot agree because Christ has taught us otherwise. We love them, because God loves us,
even when we do things which God does not agree with, and which He taught us
not to do, no matter how big or how small. That is why the fourth point is as same as the first: love
the person.
Jesus
summed up the law and the prophets in two commandments: love God with all of
who we are, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Everything the Church teaches as true and part of our faith
stems from those two commandments.
As we seek to live those commandments out we try with all our strength
to love the person; do not condemn; call to conversion; love the person.
