A homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 19, 2021
Wis 2:12, 17-20, Jas 3:16—4:3, Mk 9:30-37
The core of our faith — the core of our relationship with our Creator and all of Creation — is the Two Great Commandments: Love God and Love Neighbor.
So beautifully simple and pure that even a child can understand them, to paraphrase a slogan, which is part of why Jesus is so often chronicled as embracing children, who in his day were considered replaceable chattel the same way women were.
So we have two radical ideas: Love can be uncomplicated and children and women are people with worth in God’s eyes.
Now what?
The simplicity of the Two Great Commandments can hide the depth and complexity of their meaning and consequence. What they mean, and how they challenge us, deserve our time and thought.
We can’t hug and kiss our transcendent God, so how do we say “I love you?”
Gratitude is a great start. By thanking God daily, hourly, continually, we show appreciation for all good gifts.
Stewardship shows God that not only do we intellectually and emotionally appreciate the gifts she showered on us, it also affirms that we’re putting that appreciation into action by taking care of these precious resources.
Obedience to God’s other, more nitty-gritty commandments and rules and regulations about the universe and science keeps us on a path home to God. We should rely on our well-formed consciences to guide us, of course, and remember how Jesus scorned the Pharisees and other Israelite leaders who got hung up on the choreographed actions dictated by the letter of their laws. Those societal laws, of course, were flawed human attempts to know the Mind of God, filtered through their locally lived experiences and not necessarily with a true big-picture perspective.
That means tattoos and shrimp are fine if they’re your thing.
Loving our neighbors, oddly, is a bit more complicated than loving God. God is big beyond all measurement and all-powerful and connected through the universe, but God is also singular and constant.
People are not.
So where do we start?
The full version of “love your neighbor” is translated variously as “love your neighbor as yourself” and “love your neighbor as yourself for the love of God.” Since we’ve already done some pondering about the “for the love of God” part, let’s pick apart the “as yourself” element.
Loving yourself — loving ourselves — is first and foremost an act of gratitude and stewardship, because taking care of ourselves means we are caring for a precious gift from the Almighty. Then, when we take care of ourselves, we have the ability, the health, the stamina to care for others. The song lyric is right: You can’t love another without loving yourself.
But can we — should we — treat other people exactly the same way we would want to be treated? Football fans may not want to be treated to a night at the opera.
No, the nuance here is that every fellow child of God on this fragile blue marble deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and, specifically, with respect for who they are and how they live. Men, women and children, each with immense value.
Love your neighbor as they would prefer to be loved.
That’s the heavy lift. That’s the complication. That’s the deep realization that one size does not and never will fit all.
All humans are created equal but none were created identical, not completely, not even identical siblings.
Our relationships with each person we meet can start with our figuratively dressing them in an XXL jersey, but we quickly must tailor those relationships to the contours of their lives.
Gay, straight, otherwise. Woman, man, otherwise. The family of humanity comprises millions of permutations. Every one of them is an aspect of the image and likeness of God.
That’s the heavy lift. That’s the complication. That’s how this simple “love thy neighbor” cross-stitch turned out to be a coat of many colors.
And that’s the way to obey the Two Great Commandments. We tailor — we forge — our relationships with Creator and Created, based on pure love that accepts and tries to understand and embrace who all of us are.
Each of us has an inner child deep down somewhere. When Jesus embraced the children, he was embracing actual kiddies back then and he was embracing our inner children today.
Isn’t it time we hugged Jesus back?
