Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 30^th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A) on October 25, 2020 at St. Austin Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Exodus 22:20-26; Psalm 18; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; and Matthew 22:34-40.

Our first reading is the first of many portions of the Law and the Prophets in the Jewish Scriptures that clearly state our responsibility to care for aliens, widows, and orphans. Interestingly, these categories of people were defined more broadly by the ancient Israelites than we define them today. While many widows in Israel were destitute, others held some sort of financial power. An orphan was any child in Israelite society without a father. An alien was anyone living in Israel without close relatives or without a claim of land.  

Today is a day to wrestle with hard questions: 

• Who is our neighbor?  
• Have we done all that God expects us to do for them?  

Let us ask God for mercy when we’ve fallen short of the mark. 

In the centuries before Jesus’ birth, many rabbis attempted to distill the 613 laws found in the first five books of the Jewish Bible down to a few words. Jesus’ answer today is not very different from other well-respected rabbis. If Jesus says anything new, it’s that he explicitly raises “love of neighbor” to the same level of importance as “love of God.”

So, who is our neighbor? Who does God compel us to love? Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, famously said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “all men are created equal, … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We can summarize United States history as a history of whom we understand to be included in this declaration of equality. To Jefferson, “all men” really meant only white males who owned property. We now understand the phrase to include people of all socio-economic classes, al though it seems as if people under a certain income level will have a significantly harder time achieving “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We now understand “all men” to include people of color, although most of the rights they received under the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments were subsequently stripped away by Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. For over a century, we have understood the phrase to include women, although they still face challenges, especially in the workplace. In the past 30 years, we have made strides to better include people with disabilities, although we still have a long way to go. 

Recently, Americans have become remarkably more supportive of the civil rights of people who identify as gay or lesbian. Why did this drastic change of opinion happen, seemingly overnight? I think we reached a point where most Americans had a relative or a close friend who identified as gay or lesbian.¹ In other words, most Americans now consider them to be neighbors whom they should love as themselves. Let’s be clear: in the United States, we continue to debate issues of inclusion for the poor, for people of color, for women, for people with disabilities, and for people with same-sex orientations. But now, debating these issues is part of our public dialogue. 

So today, whom do we consider to be our neighbor? Is there anyone whom we do not consider to be our neighbor? In his new encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis goes radically further than our government has ever considered going. He forcefully makes the case that all people – no matter where in the world they live, no matter their income level, no matter their religious beliefs – deserve our love and concern. Francis cites a lot of Scripture passages, including both our first reading and our gospel passage today. But the main passage Francis uses, not surprisingly, is Jesus’ response to a lawyer who asks, “Who is my neighbor?” – the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Over the second chapter of Fratelli Tutti, Francis recognizes that each of us has probably lived out the roles of every character in the story: the robbers causing harm to others, the religious hypocrites who pass by, the powerless victim, and the compassionate outsider who takes action. How often do we play the role of the first three categories of characters, rather than being moved to action with the same compassion as the Good Samaritan?

In this unpredictable year of 2020, it is tempting to think that we do not have the energy or the resources to look beyond our family and friends. But there’s an odd coincidence: this pandemic so far has aligned perfectly with our chronological journey through the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew. In January in chapter 5, we heard Matthew’s Jesus begin his public ministry by declaring, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In August in chapter 15, we may have heard Jesus declare that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” but then he healed the Canaanite woman’s daughter only four verses later. And next month in chapter 25, in Jesus’ final teaching before his passion, death, and resurrection, he will declare, “What you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” 

While widening the circle of inclusion is a dominant story in United States history, there are plenty of “the least ones” we still consider to be outside of the circle. Do we acknowledge our responsibility to people who live in other parts of the world – to consider our policies’ consequences on them, or to use our resources to improve their circumstances? Much closer to home, in our personal lives, do we have good friends who have a different skin color than us, or who have significant disabilities? To me, it seems only when the majority of Americans come to know and love people within a certain group as individuals, that we start to love them as ourselves. Do we recognize recent immigrants as our neighbors? Do we recognize refugees as our neighbors? Do we recognize Muslims as our neighbors? We really only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.

This month’s news cycle shows how difficult it is for many of us to take Jesus’ commandment seriously. When Pope Francis released his encyclical – a document that radically challenges us to re-examine who we consider to be a neighbor worthy of our love – it was barely covered by the secular media. At the time, most of us probably thought that the news of the election was crowding out all other stories. Yet this week, when it was reported that Pope Francis made comments in favor of same-sex civil unions,² the media went bananas. (I was on a silent retreat, and even I heard about it!) Some Catholic leaders felt compelled to release statements calling the pope mistaken or causing confusion³ … even though some of these same leaders felt no need to release press statements on the encyclical.

To conclude, I come back to the words of Dorothy Day, one of the four Americans Pope Francis mentioned by name when he addressed Congress in 2015. If we really only love God as much as we love the person we love the least, what does it mean when we resist our God-given obligations to care for one another?

Notes: