The Sixteenth
Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
Dear brothers and sisters,
Just
a few moments ago, we collected our various intentions and presented them together
to the Father, praying the Lord to “increase the gifts of [his] grace” so that,
we, his servants, will be “ever watchful in keeping [his] commands.”[1] This prayer, then, presumes
two things about us: first, that we desire to keep his commands and, second,
that we know what his commands are.
The
commands of the Lord Jesus are not always easy, this we know, but they are
always simple for they consist in one thing. The Lord Jesus summarized his commands,
saying:
You shall love the
Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your
mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The
second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and
the prophets depend on these two commandments (Matthew 22:37-40).
We
might say that the first and second commandment are really the same because both
require love, first to God and then to neighbor; we might also say that they
are not separate commands, but one command, since the one flows directly from
the other. To love God is to honor him, for it is right and just for the
creature to worship the Creator. To love our neighbors is to desire and to work
for what is for his or her true and lasting good. Loving in this way is not
easy, but it is supremely simple.
The
gifts of God’s grace might likewise be simply summarized in one principle gift,
a gift named in the final line from the first reading: the “repentance of sins”
(Wisdom 12:19). The reality of sin and its consequences have fallen rather out
of fashion in recent years and some now even deny any deed or thought can
really be sinful. Even within the confessional, too many go so far as to say, “I
haven’t really done anything wrong,” and think themselves alright, being, in
their own estimation, “a good person.” This is due, in no small part, to the
subtlety of the evil one who sows while men sleep and pay little heed (cf.
Matthew 13:25). It is also due to our own pride, for we do not like to
acknowledge we are not always very lovable and that we fail to love God and
neighbor in ways both great and small.
Let
me illustrate the Devil’s subtlety with a personal anecdote. One warm summer day perhaps ten years ago, I was returning
home from a visit with a few friends dressed in what we priests call “normal
people” clothes (this will be important). I stopped at a gas station and after
filling up went inside to pay. As soon as I walked through the door, the
cashier said to me, “Will you watch the store? I need to use the restroom?” and
with that she was gone. A bit taken aback, I did not quite know what to do.
Certainly, it is good to be rewarded
for kind acts (so long as we do not come to expect to be rewarded); it is good
to be cooled on a hot day; and it is also good to have our hunger satisfied.
However, it is never good to obtain attain any of this through an evil act,
through sin. This is way of the evil one, who presents good things to us but suggests
we obtain them through an immoral manner; “the end justifies the means” might well
be the motto of Satan. I was tempted to obtain three goods by forsaking that
which is the greater good, the moral law. (For the record, I did not take the
Snickers ice cream bar, nor – as a self-imposed penance – did I buy one that
day.)
The
evil one continually roams the fields of the Father sowing his seeds. These
weeds grow and seek to intertwine their roots among those of the wheat and
slowly they poison it. Once poisoned, the wheat produces little or no fruit and
is worthless, good only to be collected with “all who cause others to sin and
all evildoers” and cast into the fire (Matthew 13:41).
It
sometimes happens that we accept the lies of the evil one and give in to his subtle
tricks; we sometimes live, act, and think more like weeds than like wheat. The
roots of his weeds have grown and spread so far that many who think themselves
wheat in the Father’s fields no longer acknowledge right and wrong; they do not
keep the Father’s commands and - worse yet – they do not think them important,
but see them as something for a bygone era. In his or her pride, the false
wheat – the weed -does not acknowledge his or her sin, that in deeds and
thoughts, in things done and not done, he or she has fallen short of the mark and
has not produced the proper fruit.
Several
years ago, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger rightly warned of this danger:
We, however, have a different goal:
the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An
"adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and
the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with
Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us
a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from
truth.[2]
How,
then, do we distinguish the true from the false? How do we love truly and
authentically?
We
do so by “be[ing] ready to preserve the grace received from the day of our
Baptism, continuing to nourish faith in the Lord that prevents evil from taking
root.”[3] It was in Baptism that we
rejected Satan and all his works and all his empty promises, yet this rejection
must be made time and again throughout our lives. This requires a regular
examination of our consciences with one simple question: When and how did I
fail to love today?
When
we begin to ask this question at the end of every day, our sin will become
apparent to us and we will have “good ground for hope” because the Lord is
“good and forgiving, abounding in kindness to all who call upon [him]” (Wisdom 12:19; Psalm 86:9). Here we see that his kindness requires that we first call
upon him, that we acknowledge our sin and pray, “Turn toward me, and have pity
on me; give your strength to your servant” (Psalm 86:16). It is good for us to
remember what Pope Francis has so often said: “God never tires of forgiving us;
we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.”[4]
All
of this, of course, presupposes that we desire to be “fervent in hope, faith,
and charity.”[5]
Put another way, it presupposes that the primary goal of our lives is that we
grow in holiness, that we be true and faithful friends of Jesus, that we
produce much fruit and yield a rich harvest (cf. John 12:24). When we think of
growing of holiness, we often grow somewhat uncomfortable because we think it
is something beyond us and perhaps not even meant for us. Nothing could be
farther from the truth! The Lord desires this for each of us. He desires that
we be righteous and “shine like the sun in the kingdom of [our] Father”
(Matthew 13:43)!
We should not be afraid of holiness or shy away from it; rather, we should desire it with all of our heart! It is only by continual growth in holiness that we will find the satisfaction and fulfillment of our every yearning. And it is only by using the Sacrament of Penance well and regularly that this continual growth can come about.
Just
as at the end of each day we should ask where we failed to love, at the
beginning of each day we should ask for the strength to love. We should keep in
mind and heart this advice of J.R.R. Tolkien: “To ourselves we must present the
absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural
strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall
short of the utmost that we could achieve.”[6]
[1] Roman Missal, Collect for
the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 18
April 2005.
[3] Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, 17 July 2011.
[4] Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, 3.
[5] Collect for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
[6] J.R.R. Tolkien, Draft Letter to Eileen Elgar, September
1963. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A
Selection Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the Assistance of Christopher
Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 326.
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