Homily

Sunday, September 7, 2008, 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A
Assumption Grotto Parish, Detroit

Charity towards One’s Neighbor is Necessary for Salvation

            In this year of St. Paul, we continue meditating on his glorious writings in the sacred liturgy. Mother Church has proposed Romans to us for several weeks, and today we read the last piece we will read in the Sunday cycle.

            I mentioned previously that there are two halves of this Epistle, the first eleven chapters being the dogmatic part, and those from twelve on being the practical. We now find ourselves in the practical part of the Epistle, in chapter thirteen. The previous chapter is a powerful exhortation and teaching regarding the practice of charity with one another; this chapter associates charity to salvation; and more will follow in later chapters, for example, that the Romans – and we – should stop criticizing and condemning one another over matters of opinion.

            We know that, in today’s verses, he ties salvation to our practice of charity with one another. The second reading ended with the verse, “love is the fulfillment of the law.” The next verses go on, “The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light” (vv. 11-12). Since salvation is nearer, we need to urgently hurry up and love one another.

            St. Paul states some of Moses’ commandments: killing, adultery, stealing, coveting. All of these offend God, because they offend our neighbor. Yet there are many ways in which we can sin against these commandments. Abortion, pornography, contraception, cheating, and other such are all mortal sins against these commandments. Still more, there are ways to break these commandments which are more indirect, and, since they are indirect, of themselves are matter of venial sins.

            To some of these venial sins against charity, let us now direct our attention. I think that most of you here at Mass today don’t have regular temptations to murder your next door neighbor; but it is probable that many of you have frequent temptations of impatience, anger and arrogance in dealing with the members of your own home.

            How often it is the persons whom we most love against whom we most easily fail against charity. We take them for granted. Spouses use spouses, mothers and fathers vent their frustrations on their children, kids mount their pride in disobedience to their parents. Instead of bearing each other’s burdens, we stand around correcting one another and brooding, all while the demons celebrate at our demise. Pride incites one person to keep lists of the other person’s defects registered in his memory, and not even perfectly but embellished with hot rhetoric, only to be used as a weapon in a tense moment, or to make oneself prevail in power over another. (Ah, if only proud people knew how silly they look!) It only takes one arrogant person, even if he were the youngest child or the father of the family, one of the siblings or the mom, to make the entire household wretched, bitter, hateful, angry and full of contempt.

            How can any family survive when charity is lacking? How can any parish or diocese survive, when parishioners fail in their charity, when priest rises up against priest in arrogance, or abuses his power to mistreat other priests farther down the power-scale than he? How can the Church bear witness to the newness of life which Christ came to give us, when all her members are sunken into bickering because of their pride? How can families pass on the faith, when the anger and antagonism, the resentment and exasperation, the sadness and despair makes the children simply hate the Catholicism to which such vices are associated?

            These are important matters to which to attend, even though they appear small. They are venial sins, and venial sins dispose us to mortal sin and extinguish our fervor.

            When Christ united us all to himself in his mystical body by sanctifying grace, charity towards our neighbor became a worship of God himself. This is so not because of a metaphysical identity between God and neighbor – that would be blasphemous – but because of the moral identity Christ willed when he taught, “Whatsoever you do – whatsoever, mind you, everything – to the least of my brethren – even those weaker than you, or those whom you despise – that you have done unto me, Christ the Lord” (cf. Mt 25:40). Christ gave us those words when he told us how the judgment will be at the end of time.

            If you cannot love your neighbor out of virtue, love your neighbor out of fear of judgment. For God has associated the practice of charity to our neighbor to our own salvation. Love one another! Mortify the deeds, the thoughts and the words of the old man, and put on the new man, who is Christ! Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as yourself! I say this, so you may save your souls.

            Mary herself practiced supreme charity, by being the woman whose obedience gave us our Savior. May she help us to love one another as is pleasing to the Lord, by her powerful intercession. Amen.