Homily for Sunday, 25 June 2017

Sunday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 20:10-13; Psalm 69:8-10, 14, 17, 33-35; Romans 5:12-15; Matthew 10:26-33

Could we imagine ourselves as among Jesus’ first Twelve Apostles? Jesus goes up a mountain one night to pray and, when he returns, he chooses you and eleven other people to be his closest and most trusted friends. How would you feel? I, for one, would have been thrilled to have been chosen as one of Jesus’ first Twelve Apostles! That is, until the very first time we meet together. Suddenly, Jesus starts warning us that, as his closest friends, we will be persecuted, ridiculed, and eventually killed.

Who here would want to continue to be Jesus’ close friend then? How many of us would be afraid to continue openly to be Jesus’ close friend; one of his Apostles? I would be afraid. Yet, just when Jesus, I imagine, has his newly-chosen Apostles quaking with fear, unsure of whether they want to continue to be close to him, he speaks to them the first words we hear of today’s Gospel reading, from Matthew: “Fear no one.”

If we were among Jesus’ first Apostles, how many of us would still not be convinced by Jesus’ asking us to “fear no one”? For how many of us is Jesus’ assurance that we are “worth more than many sparrows”; indeed that we are worth more and of greater dignity than any other creature, created in the image and likeness of God, still not quite enough to overcome our fear?

I ask these questions, sisters and brothers, because we live in a world today that gives us many reasons to fear. In this respect, little has changed since the time of Jesus, or since human beings have walked this earth. The names of the persecutors; of those who make us afraid; of those who even endanger human lives have changed, but the fact of our world giving us many causes to fear has not changed. And fear is a natural human response; a feeling; an emotion. Fear is neither good nor bad; it simply is, in each one of us. If we are honest with ourselves, does not each of us fear something or somebody at some point in our lives?

Since I have been back here at St. Kateri for this short time, I have been deeply moved by how many of us, members of this parish, continue to voice concern for me and pray for me while I am studying in Paris. Many of us have asked me, “Isn’t it becoming unpredictable and even dangerous in Paris? Have you been near to the terrorist attacks that have taken place there”? My response to you has been something like, “Yes, there has been chaos and violence in our world recently, even close to me in Paris. But so far I am safe, and we cannot live in fear.” If we live in fear in response to violence and terrorism in our world, we give those who commit these hideous, murderous acts, who do Satan’s work in our world, exactly what they want. Those who commit violence and terrorist acts want us to be afraid; after all, we call their actions terror-ism.

In reality, though, I cannot help but feel fear when these acts of violence and terrorism occur, especially when they happen near me or people I know and love. On November 13, 2015, barely two months after I first arrived in Paris, 130 people were killed across the city. The nearest site of the Paris attacks, the Bataclan concert theatre, is only four miles from my apartment. For a few days, an eerie silence hung over Paris. I felt and lived this fear, even as I did my best to let as many people; as many of us know as possible that I was safe. Since then, there have been attacks in Brussels, Berlin, Nice, London, Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt, and other places including the little village of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, France, where Fr. Jacques Hamel was killed while celebrating Mass last July. Bloodshed continues in places like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and around the world.

Our world gives us many reasons to fear. Let me say, then, a heartfelt thank you for your concern and your prayers. And let me continue to offer my prayers for us and for our well-being. When I say we cannot live in fear, I do not mean to be curt or to ignore your concern and even your fear for me or at the state of our world. Whenever I am here at St. Kateri, I sense an almost familial love that often expresses itself as concern: Is Father safe? How are his studies going? Is he getting enough to eat (all questions that have been asked of me here in these last two weeks, by the way)? These are questions similar to those my mother asks me, as mothers (and fathers, too) naturally do, even many years after I have left home, have taken vows with the Basilians and been ordained a priest, and have travelled around much of the world. To us, I will always be a brother in Christ; a son of St. Kateri. St. Kateri is always “home away from home.” Together, might we here at St. Kateri be like Jesus’ first Apostles, whom Jesus called from home to our heavenly home, and who in the process eventually succeeded in making our world a little less chaotic, violent, and fearsome.

Might we be like Jesus’ first Apostles, to whom our Lord said, “Fear no one… And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” May we be like the prophet Jeremiah, who from God accepted a similar mission to Jesus’ Apostles’ and our mission: Go out into the world. Speak and live not the message that the people necessarily want to hear, but that they need to hear (and pray to discern the often fine line between these). Risk everything; risk being denounced, misunderstood, and ridiculed; risk even our own lives for the message that God gives us to proclaim and to live: A message of love beyond all telling; a message of love that saves us; a message of love that is greater than any fear.

In response to the violence and the fearsomeness of the world, might we be like the Psalmist, who today cries out through our song, “Lord, in your great love, answer me.” Those who wrote the Psalms in our Bible experienced fear. They knew the fear of suffering, illness, and death; the fear of enemy nations and their more powerful armies; the fear of the effects of their own sin. It is no wonder, then, that about two thirds of the Psalms in the Bible are laments. The Psalmists were some of the best and most effective complainers our world has ever known! Fear not; may we cast our fears and anxieties on God, for God has a thick skin.

“Lord, in your great love, answer me.” Knowing God’s great love for us, then, might we be like St. Paul or the Romans he first addressed with the letter from which we hear today in our second reading. May we fear no longer even our own sin. There is no sin too great for God to forgive. And may our Church, through Reconciliation, Eucharist, and her other Sacraments, and by the way we live, welcoming each other as redeemed sinners, be ever more our world’s instrument of forgiveness; of absolution; of freedom from sin. St. Paul says to the Romans that sin and so “death reigned from Adam to Moses.” Sin and death reigned until Jesus Christ conquered these by his death on the Cross. Sin and death and, with these, fear, reign no more over our world.

Love reigns in our world now, and enables us to go out into a still sometimes-fearsome, violent, sinful world. We go out into this world with an Apostle’s mission; a mother’s, father’s, sister’s, or brother’s mission; a prophet’s mission; a Psalmist’s mission; Christ’s own mission entrusted to us to love as he loves us; to love one another from this world into heaven, and to “fear no one.”

Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2016– Nativity of the Lord

Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

A little over two thousand years ago, Caesar Augustus was emperor of Rome. “Quirinius,” we hear today from Luke’s Gospel, “was governor of Syria.” Would this not have been a terrifying world in which to be born; in which to raise a family; in which to live?

I invite us to imagine the world of the time, under the so-called “pax Romana,” the peace of Rome. This peace of Rome was a false peace; a peace gained in large part by suppression and oppression. The peace imposed by those in power, by the likes of Augustus and Quirinius, was a peace dependent on the greater political and military might of Rome over its enemies. And anybody who challenged this rule by might could find their well-being and even their lives in danger.

In this world governed by the “peace of Rome,” in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, the village of Nazareth in Roman Palestine, there lived a faithful, humble, quiet Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph. And do we not know how the story unfolds from there? Mary, “engaged” to Joseph, finds herself “expecting a child.” This child, revealed by “an Angel of the Lord” to “shepherds living in the fields” and now to us as the “Saviour, who is Christ the Lord,” would bring to this world a long-awaited peace, not the “peace of Rome” but peace that can only be from God.

This child of Mary and Joseph, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whose birth we remember and celebrate today, made the prophecy of Isaiah a reality: “For a child has been born to us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” And yet if we go back to the time of Isaiah, his prophecy we hear in our celebration today is all the more remarkable because Isaiah spoke it in a world that was anything but at peace.

The world and nation of Israel in which Isaiah lived and prophesied were a world and a nation obsessed with peace, security, and authority, but only for an elite minority of the people. On the surface, all was well in Israel of Isaiah’s time, a nation at its most prosperous; its most powerful. But Isaiah says to the elites, the kings and rulers of Israel, that all their wealth; that all their prosperity; that the peace of the nation is fickle and superficial so long as it remains concentrated in the hands of a few. Israel will be brought low, its people exiled. Only then will true prosperity, true justice, true authority, and true peace be able to take root and flourish in Israel and in the world. This prosperity; this justice; this authority; this peace will uphold the dignity of the least well-off. Nobody will be in need.

Returning to Jesus’ time, we hear from Luke’s Gospel that, sadly, not much has changed from the time of Isaiah. The names of Israel’s and the world’s rulers have changed, but the fickle and superficial peace of the end of the line of Israel’s kings had become the fickle and superficial peace of Rome, hinging as ever on the worldly might and wealth of a few.

Into this world “is born this day in the city of David [our] Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord.” Into this world of fickle and superficial peace is born, in a manger of all places, our “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” This reality might raise for us some questions: First, why would God choose to be born into this world as a helpless and vulnerable baby in a manger? If this Jesus were truly the one Isaiah foretold, “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” why did he not impose God’s true peace on our world? Instead, Jesus would die broken and shamed, helpless and vulnerable on a cross! Why?

We might answer questions like these (rightly) by saying that God’s way is a way of mercy, not one of imposing but of inviting us and remaining with us on this long journey toward the peace God has willed for our world since its creation. But if this is so, then clearly God is more patient with our world than I am and I anticipate many of us are. God sees, I imagine, a broken world and yet a world never beyond the reach of true peace; of redemption; of salvation. This is why God sent his only Son into this world, and why God promises that Christ will return to this world at the end of time to complete God’s work of redeeming and saving this world. But then what is worth redeeming and saving in this world?

The answer to this question is right here among us. My sisters and brothers in Christ, moments ago we heard from the letter to Titus that “he it is,” our God, “who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.” Are we not, then, “a people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good deeds”? If we were not, I do not think we would be here. If we were not “a people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good deeds,” there would be no Church; no Christian faith; nobody to worship and to celebrate our memory as a community of faith of Christ’s birth and our waiting for his return. And our world would be poorer for it.

And so where does our zeal “for good deeds” leave us? At the end of this Mass, I will send us forth with the Church’s blessing, inviting us to “go in the peace of Christ.” We will “go in the peace of Christ” into a dark winter’s night; into a world with many people who still “walk in darkness”; a world of families; of human relationships; of entire nations deeply immersed in the “land of deep darkness” of which the prophet Isaiah once spoke. And too often “deep darkness” is masked by a fickle and superficial peace: A peace that may be the mere absence of war; peace that is at best the temporary respite of tens of millions in our world displaced from their homelands by war and persecution; so-called peace that denies countless people basic human rights, beginning with the fundamental right to life from conception to natural death; peace that is, not far beneath the surface, gossip, passive aggression, and silence that block paths to truth and reconciliation. This is false peace, not the “peace of Christ” in which God and the Church invite us to “go forth” from this celebration.

No longer is Caesar Augustus emperor. No longer is “Quirinius… governor of Syria.” In their place today are far more murderous leaders, if not a lack of leadership that breeds war, terrorism, and other forms of extremism, much of it happening in regions that are the cradle of our Christian faith, unchecked and even encouraged by more powerful nations. Yet still, through Isaiah, God promises us: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness‒ on them light has shone.” God promises us a redeeming and saving “authority” that “shall grow continually”; the authority of the one we call “Prince of Peace.”

God’s promise; God’s Word; God’s Christ; God’s true peace lives among us here and now. Our God respects our freedom too much to impose peace on us. And so, in freedom, God invites us to “go in the peace of Christ.” God invites us to go out willingly, to be the “great light” amid the sometimes “great darkness” of our world. God invites us to sense, to take “great joy” in the signs of God’s presence already in our world, and to be these signs by our zeal “for good deeds”; for words and deeds of kindness, of generosity, of justice, and of peace.

Today this longing and in places terrifying (and terrified) world celebrates the birth of its true peace. From Bethlehem, “the city of David,” to Sherwood Park to the world may we be a sign of our “Prince of Peace”; active, zealous signs of our “good news of great joy for all the people: To you,” to us, “is born this day… a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”  

Homily for Monday, 29 August 2016‒ Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist

Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:17-19; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4a, 5-6. 15ab, 17; Mark 6:17-29

This homily was given at Anglin House, Cardinal Flahiff Basilian Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada.

What would have been the response of John the Baptist’s and of Jesus’ disciples to the news of John’s death at the hands of Herod? I imagine John’s and Jesus’ disciples as having been heartbroken and probably afraid. John’s beheading would have been a great blow to the earliest Church, second only in devastation to Jesus’ own death.

Might we not imagine John’s and Jesus’ disciples thinking about abandoning their lives as disciples out of fear; wanting to return to their former livelihoods; wondering whether their own deaths at the hands of the authorities of their time and place were at hand? This was certainly the case for these same disciples after Jesus’ death.  But, had the disciples of John the Baptist and of Jesus fled after John was killed, their story and ours as Christians would have ended there. And even though most of Jesus’ disciples fled after his death, they reassembled, even if in fear at first, to witness to Jesus’ resurrection and to take up the Christian mission with the strength of the Holy Spirit.

These first disciples’ story; our Christian story continues because these first disciples, of John and then of Jesus, did not give into fear. They accepted their own vulnerability, the finiteness of their own earthly lives, their sin and their need for God’s mercy and forgiveness. The disciples’ example is in marked contrast to that of Herod, who would not accept his own vulnerability and finiteness of his rule or his life. He would not accept John’s speaking truth to Herod’s wrongful marriage to his brother’s wife Herodias, beyond a superficial level of liking “to listen to” John. Herod’s lack of acceptance of vulnerability and of truth led him to commit murder.

John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ disciples’ example of acceptance of vulnerability and of their need for God is an invitation to us to follow suit. Our world gives us many reasons to be afraid. Over this summer, while I have taught in Edmonton and so far travelled here to Toronto, I have been asked many times about the response in France to several terrorist attacks: Those in Paris last November; the killing of Fr. Jacques Hamel in July while he was presiding at Mass near Rouen; the Bastille Day attack in Nice… I have been encouraged that many French have not retreated in fear after these attacks; they have back out on the café terraces, living as French people do, within days of these awful events.

This is not to say that the French, nor we nor anybody, are or should be completely without fear. But may we not allow our fear, our vulnerability, even our sin to break us. May what could break us instead be what brings us together and brings us closer to God, after the example of the disciples of John the Baptist and of Jesus, and of John and Jesus themselves.    

Homily for Wednesday, 20 July 2016– Ferial

Wednesday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:1, 4-10; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4a, 5-6ab, 15, 17; Matthew 13:1-9

This homily was given at the chapel of Kateri House Women's Residence of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Have any of us ever been asked to do something we thought to be difficult, or even unreasonably beyond our capabilities?

Today’s readings are especially meaningful to me for a few reasons: Our reading from Jeremiah was the first reading during my ordination as a deacon three years ago this upcoming September. And, well before I was a priest, or a deacon, or a seminarian, or even a microbiology lab tech, the job I had immediately before entering the seminary, I was a mushroom farmer.

On the farm, if I may describe the process of planting or, as we called it, spawning the mushrooms, it was not like planting most ordinary vegetables. The spawn is like little sticky grains, each of the size and consistency of cooked rice. To spawn the mushrooms, the farmer takes a handful of these little grains and scatters them somewhat haphazardly on the growing beds that have been layered with soil. Most of the spawn lands on the fertile soil, where it quickly takes root and, after a month or so, produces tasty mushrooms. But some spawn lands on the farmer’s clothing, or on the floor of the growing room where it is trodden under foot, or in other places where it will not grow into mushrooms.

Does this sound familiar to any of us? Perhaps few if any of us have been mushroom farmers, and yet Jesus’ parable of the sower reminds me of the mushroom farm every time I hear it: The sower scatters seed haphazardly. Some seed falls “on good soil” and brings “forth grain” of a sizeable yield, but as much or more seed falls “on the path,” where the birds eat it. “Other seeds fall on rocky ground” where they lack soil and are scorched by the sun; still other seeds fall “among thorns” and are choked out.

I question God’s efficiency as a sower! Could our Almighty God not have sown seed more efficiently than haphazardly scattering it to fall where it may? Even we mushroom farmers are (maybe) more efficient and less messy when spawning than the sower is in Matthew’s Gospel. And, most inefficiently of all, God asks us to take part in the sowing!

As a priest, I consider this to be a most difficult task, although not beyond my capabilities most days. An exception lately has been when we hear and many are scared by the latest horror in the world: Terrorist attacks; police shooting or being shot; wars; other violence; gossip and bullying… I want to protest, in Jeremiah’s words, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”

And there God is to say to me; to us: “Do not be afraid… Now I have put my words into your mouth.” Imagine, then, God handing us a large container of seed; a handful of mushroom spawn, and asking us: “Will you help me to scatter this seed; to speak my Word to a world in need? Do not worry first about efficiency. Do not be afraid; together we will make a great big creative mess in our world! Enough seed will fall on fertile soil that the yield will be amazing. I promise.”

Homily for Monday, 29 June 2015‒ Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul

Monday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Acts 12:1-11; Psalm 24:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-18

“Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” What do these words, first spoken by Jesus to St. Peter, mean for us today?

We live in a world of many crises, far from and near to us. Within the past week terrorist attacks have taken place in Kuwait, in Tunisia, and in France. Racism still rears its head in these United States. It has been exposed by the killing of nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the role the Confederate flag may have as a symbol of racial hatred. We have heard this past weekend of the killing of one escaped convict and the capture of another here in New York State after a long manhunt. And with the recent Supreme Court ruling our country is once again deeply polarized over the meaning of marriage. Many, particularly some in leadership positions in the Church, have offered reasoned and nuanced reflection on this issue. I find this encouraging. But still many have forgotten due charity toward one another, especially those with whom we disagree. Many have forgotten the primacy of human dignity and Jesus’ teachings on love of God and neighbor; are in danger of forgetting Jesus’ words to Peter: “The gates of the netherworld” will not prevail against this community of faith, the Church, that Christ has instituted and safeguarded with its teaching tradition handed on from the Apostles.

“Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” Jesus first spoke these words to Peter in a time of crisis. Jesus went with his disciples “into the region of Caesarea Philippi.” Caesarea Philippi was built as a monument to Caesar and his puppet ruler in Israel at the time, Philip the Tetrarch, descendant of Herod. A cave outside of Caesarea Philippi is known as “the gates of the netherworld.” Animals would be thrown into this cave (a kind of magic ritual) by pagan believers to make peace with their gods. If the animal did not emerge from the other end of the cave, it meant the pagan gods were satisfied; Hades was kept at bay.

Jesus says here that these pagan rituals were useless; that our God is not an angry God placated by sacrifice but a God of mercy who sacrifices his Son out of love for us. And we as Church can have confidence in our God of love and the Church Christ has founded.

All the crises of St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s time, even death for their faith; our faith did “not prevail” against this Church. All the crises present and future will “not prevail” against us, either. How deep is our confidence; our trust in these words of Jesus? Jesus invites us to trust; to hold fast to truths handed on from the Apostles; to “run the race” and keep “the faith” as St. Paul did; to confess and live as St. Peter did that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus invites us to go out into our world with confidence: “Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”

Homily for Saturday, 28 February 2015‒Saturday of the First Week of Lent

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 26:16-19; Psalm 119:1-2, 4-5, 7-8; Matthew 5:43-48

“I say to you, ‘Love your enemies.’” Might this be one of the most difficult of our Lord’s commandments to keep?

And yet Jesus is adamant in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew: For if [we] love” only “those who love” us, “what is unusual about that”? What good is it to love and to be kind only to those who return our love and kindness? In the words of many youth after falling for peer pressure, “Everybody does this”!

But to love only those who love us is not God’s way; the way of God who, Jesus says, “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Has Jesus set our moral standard too high when he urges us, “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”?

Jesus calls us as baptized Christians to rise above the excuse that “everybody does it”; to let our Christian identity stand out as a light to our world. Each and every one of us is called to holiness; to be like God: “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To be sure, this commandment of Christ is not only one of the most difficult we have to keep; it is impossible for us to keep without God’s grace. Who here is “perfect, just as [our] heavenly Father is perfect”? Our imperfection is why we have God’s grace available to us, especially through our Church’s sacraments; through Reconciliation and our Eucharist. God’s grace is available to us through our journey of Lent.

Even so, this commandment of Jesus was difficult to keep in his own time. The teaching we hear in today’s Gospel was Jesus’ response to a teaching of his day’s best moral teachers: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” Love your neighbor, Jesus says, and “love your enemy,” too. Indeed, if we have enemies at all, we have not fully lived up to our Christian calling; our love is not fully like God’s love. This is how radical Jesus’ teaching was and is.

And Jesus’ teaching has only become more difficult in our time. Gone are the days, if they ever existed, when in the words of The Godfather: Part II, we could “hold [our] friends close and [our] enemies closer.” We live in a time of divided families; an ideologically divided nation and its political institutions; divisions that have even crept into our Church. We live in a world of fear in which our enemies are more difficult to define: Not nation states, but groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

But Bishop Angaelos, Coptic Orthodox leader in the United Kingdom, said this about ISIS’ murder of twenty-one Coptic Christians in Libya nine days ago: “I have a responsibility to myself and to others to guide them down this path of forgiveness… We don't forgive the act because the act is heinous. But we do forgive the killers from the depths of our hearts.”

“Love your enemies… “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Like Bishop Angaelos, we can live this commandment of Christ, if only by God’s grace.

Homily for Thursday, 11 September 2014– Ferial

Thursday of the 23rd week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Corinthians 8:1b-7, 11-13; Psalm 139:1b-3, 13-14ab, 23-24; Luke 6:27-38

What is the most loving action in a particular situation? What is the action that will build up an individual or community? These are the questions that our readings today invite us to consider.

St. Paul faces a divided Corinthian Christian community in our first reading today. Some Christians in Corinth would not eat meat if it had been “sacrificed to idols.” For others, this was not a concern. St. Paul seems to agree that there is no moral problem in eating meat, even “sacrificed to idols,” because pagan idols are not gods. There is only one God, and so sacrifices to false gods are meaningless. But then St. Paul accommodates those whose “conscience” is too “weak” to withstand this level of moral nuance: “Therefore, if food causes my brother to sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I may not cause my brother to sin.”

Why does St. Paul reach this conclusion? I think this can only be out of love for the Corinthians; for the Church. St. Paul shows us love that goes beyond the mere legal or moral minimum. He shows us love that goes beyond obligation. He shows us love that goes beyond the reciprocal relationship of “I will do this for you if you do that for me.” St. Paul’s love is not merely sentimental. It is for the good of the people he serves; for building up of community and human relationships.

Jesus invites us to this same kind of love in our Gospel reading today. Jesus’ love is a love that seems difficult for us to emulate: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you… Do to others as you would have them do to you… Be merciful, just as also your Father is merciful… Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”

Nowhere in our Gospel does Jesus oblige us to love our enemies; to love those who hate, curse, or mistreat us (or, perhaps appropriately on this anniversary of September 11, 2001, those who commit terrorist acts against our country). Jesus does not oblige us to be merciful, or not to judge or condemn, or to forgive people who have wronged us. If this were an obligation, our love would be reduced to, “I will love those people, I suppose, if I must.” Jesus does not invite us to love merely on moral or legal grounds, or to love only those who love us, or to love in only a sentimental way.

No, Jesus, like St. Paul, reminds us that, at its fullest and most authentic, love is a gift exchange. Jesus describes God’s love; the ideal of love for us as this: “Gifts… given to [us]… a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing.” An exchange of gifts; an exchange of love is not something we must do; not something that there are laws to regulate; not something that we only do if we are promised to receive the same or a better gift in return; not something merely sentimental. If love is only this, it is not love. True love, to which St. Paul and Jesus invite us, builds relationships, builds community, brings us closer to God, and is the utmost exercise of our freedom which is itself God’s gift to us.