27 October 2002

A detail from a painting by Giovanni Cimabue, in the lower level of the Basilica at Assisi.

The National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco

Homilies from the National Shrine
of Saint Francis of Assisi

THE THIRTIETH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
27 OCTOBER 2002

[Exodus 22:20–26; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c–10; Matthew 22:34–40]

RECENTLY, I WAS READING about the gentleman who founded Famous Amos Cookies. One of the things he said about his life was that for many years he was working at a job that he didn’t particularly like. He made sure that it took him a long time to get to work, even though he was respected and even though he associated with remarkable people, people who were high profile and well known. But the problem, he said, was that his life was not fun.

As a consequence, he decided that he would find something else to do with his life, so he could experience life as being more fun. He reflected on the fact that when he read an obituary, he would note that there was the year of birth, the year of death, and, in between, there was a dash. His final comment was that we need to make sure that in that dash we put more and more fun as time goes on.

Well, unfortunately, the Christian life is not always that way. The demands placed upon us as followers of Jesus really burden us, and those burdens often become greater for us later in life rather than lesser for us later in life. Such is the case made in today’s Gospel reading which offers to us Jesus’ reflection on the greatest act of life. Basically, he says that the activity of love is the most important thing there is. It is the greatest commandment both in respect to God and in respect to neighbor. And—if we are to be honest with ourselves as people who actively love both God and neighbor—we have to spend much time doing this. It doesn’t occur naturally, and it doesn’t occur just because we are looking to have “fun” in our lives.

As Saint Paul suggested in the second reading today, a commitment to be a Christian—a commitment to be in a relationship with Jesus—requires that we find ourselves working harder, all the time; Paul uses the word afflictions. And I think it is very important for us to understand that when we commit ourselves to a Gospel of love, following the great commandments that Jesus laid out for us, we must, more and more, enter into a life of active caring and work for one another.

I can remember the days when I was working for the Engaged Encounter movement. In their reflections, and the way in which they ran that movement, the leaders asked the question, “Is this the most loving thing that I can do, or not?” And so, if you were trying to deal with a particular problem in a relationship, so as to prepare a couple for their wedding, you would ask the couple, “What is the most loving thing you can do?”

There were strict principles that we had in that particular program movement. One of the principles that came back to haunt us was something that was called “peace at all costs.” This is a state of mind which says, “I will do whatever I can in the relationship to make sure that we are at peace—even if it means that I have to give up everything that I hold dear.” It is an attitude that says, “I am going to love by giving in.” But peace at all costs is not really peace at all. Nor is it the way that truly loving and committed people live their lives. Love is often confrontational. Yes, Saint Paul, in First Corinthians, in the famous chapter on love, speaks of love as gentle and patient and kind, but often the most loving thing to do in a situation is to be somewhat confrontational. We call that “Tough Love” in some quarters.

How can we expect you, in your attempt to be the one giving out Tough Love—or some of you might have actually been recipients of Tough Love somewhere along the way—to do the most loving thing possible in any particular circumstance? A total focus on love is the most central criteria for the way in which we are to live our lives, and it is the most essential criteria for what we would consider moral behavior. And I think this is very important in the current climate in which we live and interact with each other. To ask the question, What is the most loving thing I can do in a particular circumstance? or What is the most loving thing we, as a church community or a particular church family can do in a particular circumstance? or What is the most loving thing my family can do? or What is the most loving thing my nation can do at this time? gets us to the heart of the matter of what is right and wrong.

God gives us in the Gospel today a guideline that is so central and so crucial to what it means to be Christian that it is something we dare not walk away from, unless we want to walk away from the living Christ. That is a difficult statement. Yet it is, in my mind, true to our faith and a correct statement.

Do we always know what is the most loving thing to do in a particular situation? No. Often we haven’t figured it out or we get it wrong. It’s why people disagree about what should or should not be done in a family, in a particular city, or even in a nation. So to keep our minds, as Christians, focused on the way in which we are committed to live, we need continually to come back to the question, “What is the most loving thing to do in this particular situation?”

The reading from Exodus gives us a number of examples of love that the Jewish community held to with great care. They valued the loving ways in which we must interact with one another. As I listened to the first reading, though, I was thinking to myself that some of you might wonder about the various elements of social interaction described in Exodus. What is this business about the cloak that has to be given back to a person? Well, it is a classic Judaic approach to life. It is a classic statement of what it means to be loving and caring.

In the Jewish world, when something was borrowed from someone, the borrower often gave his cloak as an assurance against what was borrowed. It’s as though you borrowed money from a bank today and put your house up to guarantee the loan. If a Jew gave his cloak as that which would guarantee the return of what he borrowed, well, he’d better get that cloak back that night so he could stay warm. Through God’s direction, the Jewish people were thinking about what is loving. They were dealing with intentions of behavior within their own community. These behaviors became simple examples of the little things that are important, if we are to live as loving people with one another.

Will we be fully successful at it? The question is silly because the answer is, “No!” We will never be fully successful at loving one another because of human weakness, but the reality is that the goal is always there. The challenge is always there. And if we respond to what the teaching asks of us, in love, we will find that our lives will probably not be just “fun” but that there will be a lot of purpose, a lot of commitment, a lot of demands made on us.

For those of you who are spouses here, regardless of how many years you have been married, that commitment to love takes work. You might think you have gotten used to one another after thirty years. You may have become used to how you respond to each other. Still, the demand is there to work at the relationship. For those of you who are parents, you probably are still trying to figure out, gradually, how to work with your children—even if they are twenty-five. And the reason is that at different stages of their lives you will treat them differently; in fact, change is inevitable.

These are the realities of day-to-day living that call on us to make our lives respond as we should to one another in a moral, loving, and good way. May I ask that God give us the Spirit, and at least show us the way, that we may know what it is to be moral and loving in our world, that we recognize that sometimes people make mistakes—sometimes they make big blunders—and that we come back from those mistakes with the sense that God is there to support us and to sustain us. We have Paul’s constant reflections, especially in the second reading today, that God is there to strengthen us, particularly when we don’t do something right. That element of our faith, that element of Christianity, is something that says to us that we need God, again and again. We should always make the effort to try again.

Not a single one of us is free from that challenge of what continues to be the call of Christ to live the two great commandments as fully and completely as we can. May you and I both be blessed with the desire to do this, with the ability to deal with frustration when the burdens be great, and with the ability to respond with insight given by the Holy Spirit when we are told to do something that we, maybe, don’t even want to do.

God bless you!

Friar Victor Abegg, OFM Conv.
THE NATIONAL SHRINE OF SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Pax et bonum