Homily
for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
14 July 2013
14 July 2013
Servant of God Dorothy Day, the co-founder
of the Catholic Worker Movement and social reformer of the Twentieth Century,
once said, “I only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
This, my brothers and sisters, is a perfect summation of the Gospel we have
just heard.
Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, knew well
and understood even better that one cannot separate the love of God and the
love of neighbor. When the scholar of the law proposed to Jesus the question, “Who
is my neighbor?”, he was testing Jesus in a way to see how Jesus might answer.
Even to this day, whether we realize it or not, we’re asking Jesus the same
question daily, because, in some way, we want Jesus to change His answer.
My friends, our faith in Jesus Christ
demands of us the constant action of love. That’s why we must come to
understand that our actions and inactions have
consequences. The way we put love into action or the way we fail to put love
into action reflects our love towards God. If we say that we love God and fail
to love our neighbor, then we are only proving that our love for God is
self-serving. If we say that we love our neighbor, but have no use for God,
then our love for neighbor becomes self-serving.
Love is the universal language,
something given to us by God that is “already in [our] mouths and in [our]
hearts,” as Moses points out to us in our First Reading. We now HAVE to act on
that love, to “carry it out”, as Moses instructed the Israelites. “. . . The
love of God is revealed in responsibility for others”, Pope-Emeritus Benedict
XVI teaches us (Spe Salvi, 28). How do we carry out
love, then? Through putting our faith in action.
Love comes to the Christian as an act of
faith. It is part of that “Light of Faith”, that Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis reminds of in his first encyclical. Our current
Holy Father, who continues to promote putting our faith into action, reminds us
(Lumen Fidei, 54):
The boundless love of our
Father also comes to us, in Jesus, through our brothers and sisters. Faith
teaches us to see that every man and woman represents a blessing for me, that
the light of God’s face shines on me through the faces of my brothers and sisters.
It is recognizing the love that God has
for us that we respond in kind through loving our neighbor. Even if we don’t
like the person, what they stand for or how they act, we are called to see
Christ in them – as difficult as that may be – and love them. And as we are
called to recognize Christ in the other, so must another recognize Christ in
us.
“Everything a baptized person does every
day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal or Spiritual Works
of Mercy,” Dorothy Day reminds us. Our love for God cannot be a love for God
alone. Our love for neighbor cannot be simply for our friends and family alone.
How we treat the least and the greatest among us, how we treat the presence of
Christ among us, is a response to our accepting God’s love in our lives, and is
a reflection of our relationship to Christ as His disciple.
As we recognize the continued binding of
love of God to love of neighbor, let us make the statement of Dorothy Day our
own: “I can only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
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Enjoy the journey . . .
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