Twenty-fourth Sunday After Pentecost

October 26th, 2008

Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass

of the

St. Thomas More Society

celebrated at

St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church , 1013 Wood Street

Scranton, PA

Matthew 22:34-40

            In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

            Our Gospel today has an interesting beginning because it does not tell us exactly how Jesus silenced the Sadducees, but His silencing of them serves as the occasion for the Pharisees to impose their test.  The Sadducees had been silenced because Jesus had proven them wrong about the resurrection of the dead, telling them, “God is not God of the dead, but of the living.”  But silencing the Sadducees was no big deal for the Pharisees, because the Pharisees knew their rivals were wrong all along.  The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead.  Jesus had proved they were superior to the Sadducees!  Now they were going to test Jesus to prove that they were superior to Jesus.  According their ideology, they were the keepers and defenders of the Law, and they were sure they could teach Jesus a thing or two about it.

            Jesus, of course, does not answer them the way that they expect, focusing on a single commandment.  Rather, he gives them two commandments and demonstrates that they are the framework upon which the entire law depends.  All the commandments proceed from the requirement to love God and our neighbor as ourselves.  In fact, God’s love for us is the basis for all the commandments, for every single law, and if we are to reflect that love, our advocacy of that law, our defense and promotion of it, must originate in our love for those God has given us to serve.  In one fell swoop Jesus silences the Pharisees, too, because He exposes their flawed orientation.  Their expertise about the Law should have been exercised to build up the people of God.  But their testing of Jesus demonstrated that they used their expertise to puff up themselves.  Jesus showed that the Pharisees could not lead the people because they did not love the people.

            We learn from this incident, first, that those who love themselves want to BE right, and those who love God and their neighbor want to DO right.  The testing the Pharisees undertook was an exercise in self-glorification, geared towards making them the undisputed authority on all matters pertaining to the Jewish religion.  Jesus had to be tested by them because He represented a threat to their authority.  Tragically, according to these calculations, the people do not factor in at all, except that the dispute centers for the Pharisees on who is in charge of the people.  Jesus says that this is the wrong question.  He asks, “Who LOVES the people?  Do you LOVE your neighbor?”

            Because we demonstrate our love for our neighbor through our actions, those who do love their neighbor desire to do right.  Again, Jesus is our example in this regard.  Not only IS He right, He DOES what is right through His sacrifice upon the cross on our behalf.  We see then that being right issues in self-glorification if that is where we stop.  To do right is not self-glorification, but self-oblation—self-offering.  If we love our neighbor as Christ loved us, we know that it is not enough simply to be right—we must do right to their benefit.

            The second thing this incident shows us is that those who love themselves do not take kindly to correction!  The Pharisees’ response to Jesus’ discourse on love is to plot His death.  Rather than reflect on the centrality of love to the entire Law, they hold onto their ideology and plot the death of the messenger who informed them of their error.

            We often see this reaction in how social engineers, both secular and dissident Catholics, criticize the Church.  The critics begin with a criticism of a particular teaching of the Church, such as its teaching on the sanctity of life and the inviolability of the right to life.  They say that the Church is not compassionate because she will not compromise the Truth and insists that the vulnerable must be protected.  She insists that those who would allow the innocent to be slaughtered—48 million over the last 35 years—these people are the ones who lack compassion.  The reaction of such critics is to advocate for laws, such as the Freedom of Choice Act, which would mandate the Church participate in a grave evil by having Catholic physicians and hospitals perform abortions.  Who can deny that such laws are crafted to destroy the Church?  These modern-day Pharisees know they are wrong and publicly have been corrected by the Church.  Their response is their attempt to kill the Church, just as the Pharisees who were corrected by Jesus plotted His death in the aftermath of their humiliation.  Who loves the people?  The Church who stands up for the right to life and suffered for it, or the pharisaic politicians who cause the innocent to suffer?

            In contrast to those who retain this ideology of power, those who truly love God and their neighbor are happily corrected.  We see this in the apologies our late Holy Father John Paul II offered for the sins committed by members of the Church throughout the ages.  We saw this most prominently when Pope Benedict XVI, on his visit to America in April this year, met personally with victims of clergy sexual abuse and expressed his profound shame for the sins that some of his brother priests had committed.  His sorrow has been matched with action, by requiring dioceses across the world to adopt standardized procedures to deal with such wickedness.

We can look to the apostles, as well, for examples of right conduct by those who love their neighbor.  Whereas the Pharisees sought to destroy Jesus after they failed to love, St. Peter sought to emulate Jesus Christ after his own great failure to love.  In their self-oblation, all of the apostles allowed Jesus to correct them.  True love is shown not in self-glorification or even self-preservation, but in the act of emptying oneself in order that the sheep may be fed.

            Those who love themselves are easy to spot because they imagine that authority means being in power and thus being the authority.  Those who love their neighbors love God also and thus recognize that all legitimate authority is accountable to the law of God, that like the Pharisees we forfeit whatever authority we have when we fail to obey the first commandment, when we fail to love God and our neighbor.

            Our work, in the end, reflects our love, whether we love God and our neighbor or merely ourselves.  If we love ourselves, our interest will be to subjugate others to our will, to obscure the truth about the dignity of man in order that we may maintain a position of privilege.  In the process, we lead ourselves and others astray.  But, if we love God and our neighbor, our desire will be to serve others, to sacrifice for others in order that the world may know the Truth about God’s love for His human creation and that people may learn the way to salvation.

            Those who love God have one more advantage.  We know that the Pharisees’ plot to kill Jesus did not work.  Killing the messenger made Him stronger and drew ever more attention to the message.  Christ’s resurrection is proof that the Truth cannot be killed, no matter the exertions of those who would devour the sheep instead of feed them.  Christ’s Body, the Church, cannot be killed either, because the Church both BEARS the message and IS the message.  The Head of the Church, Jesus Christ, is the triumph of love over ideology.  If we are to be true followers of Christ, we will desire to DO right more than we wish to BE right.  We will be happily corrected in the pursuit of the Truth, because only the Truth will allow us to serve our neighbor.  We will sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the vulnerable when the Pharisees—and the politicians—desire to devour them, because we know that in love, even if we should be killed, is life itself.