True love of neighbor demands radical conversion
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C), 2025
A temptation facing homilists preaching on the more difficult or challenging words of our Lord is to try to soften them, to take the sting out of them. And not only homilists! Pope St. John Paul II, in his 2001 message for Lent, talks about Christians who succumb to this temptation:
Lest their way of life be upset, they seek to take words like “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Lk 6:27) and render them empty and innocuous. [These] are in fact words which, if taken seriously, demand a radical conversion.
Most people don’t want “radical conversion.” Most of us, let’s be honest, want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel that we’re good people, and that God approves of people like us—and if we have enemies, they’re more or less God’s enemies too, right? Obviously change is necessary in this world, but we’d all like to think that for the most part it’s other people who have to change.
Today’s Gospel is the second of three, beginning last Sunday and concluding next Sunday, that are meant to help prepare us for the coming season of Lent. A kind of examination of conscience, a call to “radical conversion.” These three Sunday Gospels are all drawn from a passage in Luke chapter 6 often called the “Sermon on the Plain,” partly paralleling the longer Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is one of the most exalted and transformative passages in the Bible and in all of human literature, but in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain our Lord’s language is often even more challenging, more biting.
Both Matthew and Luke give us beatitudes; as we heard last Sunday, “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you shall be satisfied.” But in Luke Jesus also pronounces woes: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.” I don’t know about you, but while I don’t think of myself as rich, I haven’t gone hungry in a long time, so…
Why does Jesus say these things? What does he mean? What is the “radical conversion” to which he calls us? We can at least say this: It begins with recognizing that the way of Jesus, the gospel, inverts the logic of the world—the world we all live in. Do you want to understand the world we live in? Just reverse Jesus’ words.
Blessed are the rich and powerful! For they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are the filled and satisfied, for they got theirs.
Blessed are you when all speak well of you, because you’re a winner!But woe to you who are poor and hungry, for the world doesn’t owe you a thing.
Woe to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for that’s unrealistic and nobody cares.
That, at least to an extent, is the world we live in. That is what our Lord calls us to turn from, the “radical conversion” to which he calls us. We might think: “Those values aren’t mine!” Are we sure? We live in this culture; are we truly unaffected by it? We may not be rich and famous, but when we see someone who is wealthy, successful, famous—does that impress us? Do we talk one way to our doctor and another way to the receptionist? How about the person who pumps our gas? (That last example is confirmation that this homily was written to be preached in New Jersey!)
What must we do to be saved? Jesus, of course, tells us the answer: “Love the Lord your God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s it. That’s the whole law. Of course then naturally we want to know “Who is my neighbor?” That is, who do I have to love as myself? And, by implication, who do I not have to love as myself?
On some level I think we want to draw a limiting circle around ourselves with our “neighbors” inside and other people outside. Or perhaps a number of concentric circles: small circles for my family, my community, fellow Catholics; bigger circles for fellow Americans of various kinds (in some cases perhaps very big circles). Perhaps one circle for immigrants who are here legally and another for undocumented immigrants, assuming they get a circle at all.
This idea of love and concentric circles is very natural and even necessary to a point. You may have recently heard in the news, somewhat improbably, about the medieval moral concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love.” St. Thomas Aquinas explained it this way: What love of neighbor means in concrete situations depends partly on degrees of connection, but also partly on degrees of need. So, for example, generally speaking, I owe more to my father than to a stranger, but a stranger in urgent need—this is the part some people miss—may take priority over my father who hypothetically is doing fine.
The thing is, we tend to stack the deck in favor of the people we care about more. If I say I’m going to care first for my family, and then my community and my country, and only after that consider the needs of the rest of the world, I’m never actually going to get to the rest of the world—or probably even my fellow Americans, no matter how much greater the needs may be in some cases. This is only natural, but supernatural charity, divine love, calls us to transcend the limits of natural love. This is why Pope Francis writes, in his recent letter to the U.S. bishops defending the rights of immigrants of both legal and illegal status:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.… The true ordo amoris … is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25–37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
Samaritans were widely despised by Jews as half-breed heretic foreigners, and many Samaritans felt the same way about Jews. That’s why Jesus made the hero of this parable a Samaritan: as a challenge every form of tribalism that limits our love and causes us to see anyone else as less-than. That’s why he commands us to do the unthinkable: to love our enemies, to accept evil without retaliation, to forgive all who wrong us.
There’s a lot more to be said about what exactly that looks like in practice, but it begins with not trying to soften our Lord’s words or take the sting out. How well are we doing here? If my answer is anything like “Not as well as I could be, at best,” Jesus calls me to radical conversion. Lent is coming. What might God want to do in your heart, in mine, in this coming Lenten season?
Recently, as Deacon Greydanus has pointed out, there has been a discussion about “order amoris” and the second commandment of Jesus to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself.
There is always a tension in those loves.
Our Lord asked rightly: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?”
He asked us to see things differently.
He also said, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
I could be wrong but I think he is here talking about the hungry, the thirsty, just about anyone.
Even more strongly, he informs us about the love of neighbor in the person of the Good Samaritan. He comes across a stranger who is severely beaten and without anything. Someone clearly who he does not know.
Maybe some of us, most of us, any of us, need to be touched twice (even more) to see clearly.
I am very grateful for his charity and kind words.
The homily I heard today focused heavily on forgiveness, the radical forgiveness that Christ calls us to, that which actually heals the one who forgives, setting him free from the prison of hate towards his wrongdoer. It was a very good homily, but I kept wondering how justice played a role. I thought of how this call to forgiveness is used to silence people abused by others. I’m greatly struggling to reconcile how one is both to forgive/love their offender while justice is still need to be met. How can a rape survivor’s suffering be validated without vengeance becoming the goal?