Today is the thirty-first of October and the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time. Of course, 31 October is All Hallows Eve, the beginning of a liturgical festival of All Saints and All Souls. Therefore, it seems expedient, in the light of today’s Gospel, to reflect on just what it is that makes a saint.
In his novel, The Woman Who Was Poor, French writer Léon Bloy wrote: “There is only one sadness, and that is for us not to be saints.” Bloy also wrote: “Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.” Anyone who has truly loved knows that to love, at least to some extent, is to suffer. In Christ Jesus, we have the prime example of this reality.
The words that constitute the heart of today’s readings are not spoken by Jesus. Rather, they are spoken by the scribe who sought out the Lord: “’to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”1 In short, loving your neighbor is primarily how you love “God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”2 It’s important to bear in mind that Mark’s Gospel was written in Rome in the midst of and for a Christian community experiencing great suffering.
Anything you might do for the love of God if you fail or refuse to love your neighbor as you love yourself is not acceptable to God. In the thirteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, in his great treatise on love, Saint Paul makes this crystal clear:
If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing3If I do nice things for someone but, in my heart, despise that person, “I gain nothing.” The hardest work those who follow Jesus have to engage in is heart work. Conversely, we can engage in a lot of pious works and, like the rich young man in our Gospel three weeks ago, lack the one thing necessary to “inherit eternal life.”4
What does it mean to love your neighbor? It means not judging her/him. It means not condemning him/her. It means forgiving as many times as s/he offends you. It means praying and doing good things for someone who sets her/himself against you. Doesn’t Jesus’s command to love your enemies assume that you have some? It’s been observed that not having enemies simply means you’ve never stood for anything. Loving only those who love me is hardly a model of Christian living.
It’s easy to fixate on the injunction in our reading from Deuteronomy to keep all the precepts of the Law. Love and love alone fulfills the Law. As Jesus demonstrates over and again in his interactions with the scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees, the Law is but a means to the end of loving God with your entire being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself.
Not being a Levite, but a member of the tribe of Judah, Jesus could not be a high priest according to the Law. He is not our high priest merely because he is God’s Son. What makes him our great high priest is his willingness, as the great kenotic hymn in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians indicates, to let go of what we, as humans, take to be his divinity and to empty himself to the point of accepting death on the cross.5 He did this for love of the Father and of you and me. Jesus did what humanity could never do: fulfill the Law of God, the Law of Love. The cross, in the end, proves to be the ultimate sign of his Godhood.
According to the late theologian Fr. Herbert McCabe, the central doctrine of Christianity consists of the recognition that “if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”6 This is important when addressing the basic existential question: To love or not to love? This dilemma, which captures the often-ambivalent nature of our humanity, is well articulated in an old song by the Scottish band, Del Amitri: “It's hard to say you love someone and it’s hard to say you don't.”7
As Jesus’s followers, our vocation is to love in a self-emptying way. This is what the Eucharist, which itself is the means to the end of loving God and your neighbor, is all about. In Eucharistic Prayer III, after the consecration of the bread and the wine, we pray:
May he [Jesus Christ] make of usBeing human, all too human, we are prone to turn means into ends. We do this because it is easier to keep a list of (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) rules than it is to love others in a Christlike way come what may. The difficulty lies in the reality that a willingness to love is a willingness to suffer, to be vulnerable. Without the cross, there is no love. Without love, there is no life, certainly no eternal life.
an eternal offering to you,
so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect,
especially with the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,
blessed Joseph, her Spouse,
with your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs
and with all the Saints,
on whose constant intercession in your presence
we rely for unfailing help
Being perfect as God is perfect consists of nothing except loving perfectly. “God is love.”8 Love is what makes saints.
1 Mark 12:33.↩
2 Mark 12:30.↩
3 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.↩
4 Mark 10:17.↩
5 Philippians 2:5-11.↩
6 Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 20. 19 October 2006.↩
7 “Driving With the Brakes On,” Del Amitri, 1995.↩
8 1 John 4:8.16.↩
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