Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Some people view Catholicism as a set of rules, or maybe even a particular type of morality or ethics. They hear the Church rightly say that one ought to do this, or ought not to do that. They sense, whether from reality or from caricatures in popular culture, that being Catholic is all about going to Mass each Sunday, going to confession, saying the rosary, listening to the pope, not eating meat on Fridays, getting married in a church, not having sex outside of marriage, not contracepting, etc. And those are all aspects of the way that a Catholic, every Catholic, should be living his or her life.
When we love someone, we love not only that person, but the things that he or she loves. When we truly love someone, our affections change to better match that person’s. Our life becomes not about us, but about the other. We see this start to bloom even in adolescence when a boy starts to care more about the things that his crush likes. I think I have mentioned this before, but that’s how I started listening to country music: a girl I liked listened to country, and I wanted to have something to talk to her about. But the love of the other fully blossoms in marriage, where one’s life is not one’s own, but is inseparably joined to the other, intertwined at the deepest levels, and the importance of the other eclipses the importance of the self and one’s own desires.
God desires that we each have an encounter of love with Him. God desires not that we simply know about Him (even the demons can do that), but that we love Him, that we give our heart to Him, that He becomes more important to us than we are to ourselves, and that the things He loves become the things we love, which are really what will make us happy, since God, as our Creator, knows exactly what will fulfill our human nature.
“‘The whole law and the prophets,’” says Jesus, “‘depend on these two commandments.’” The phrase, “the whole law and the prophets” means the entirety of Scripture. All of what God has revealed depend on love of Him and love of neighbor. Every genuinely Catholic practice–every law, every precept, every commandment–needs to find its base in this two-fold commandment of love, or else it is built on sand.
This may not always seem obvious. What, we might ask, does giving up fish on Fridays have to do with love of God or love of neighbor? Is it because I’m supporting the fish industry, and those who work in it are my neighbor? Not entirely, though I suppose it is love of neighbor in that sense. But much more deeply, God has revealed to us that our desires are not always in accord with His will or with the truth. We want things we shouldn’t. And in order to help train our wills and our bodies not to go astray, God tells us that we should give up good things to focus on that which is even better: not fish in se, but on growing closer to God through restraining our human desires, even the good ones, so that we can more easily say no to the desires that take us away from God.
Or consider going to Mass every Sunday and Holyday. Can’t I love go through a screen on the TV or the computer? Can’t I offer worship to God from my couch? In a word, no; not in the same way. Is FaceTiming your spouse the same as sitting with her at the table, holding her hand, smelling her perfume, seeing the radiance of her smile in person? And God not only gives us His presence. He enters into us through the Eucharist so that we are even physically united to Him. You cannot have that watching the Mass on TV or via Live Stream. Each time we stand, or sit, or kneel it is like we are dancing with God, our bodies moving this way and that based upon how the sacred liturgy is progressing. And our encounter with God culminates in Christ giving Himself to us, giving us today the same sacrifice of some 2,000 years ago on the cross, though doing it not in an unbloody way. True love of God wouldn’t want to miss out on that for the world.
Love of neighbor follows from our love of God, because when we love someone we love the ones they love, and God loves all of His children, even the difficult ones. As we grow in our love with God, we cannot help but love our neighbor. And if we are not growing in love of neighbor, then it’s a good chance that we’re not really growing in our love of God. It is as St. John says in his first epistle: “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” Any authentic growth in holiness means that we are growing in love of our neighbor.
Yes, Catholicism has a lot of things that we do or don’t do. Yes, it has its own morality. But it’s not just dos and don’ts. It’s not just a moral system. Catholicism is a love story between the individual and God, and therefore also between the individual and God and those whom God loves. If you name a teaching or a moral precept of Catholicism, it will find its way back to love of God and love of neighbor. “‘The whole law and the prophets,’” and the whole exercise of our faith, “‘depend on these two commandments.’”
