Love Lightens Every Load – A Homily for the 15th Sunday of the Year

One could easily reduce today’s Gospel to trite moralisms: Help people in trouble; Be kind to strangers; etc. While these are certainly good thoughts, I would argue that it is about far deeper things than human kindness or ethics. This is a Gospel about the transformative power of God’s love and our need to receive it. It is not a Gospel that can be understood as a demand of the flesh.

Let’s look at the Gospel in three stages.

I. The Radical Requirements of Love – As the Gospel opens, there is a discussion between Jesus and a scholar of the law as to a basic summation of the law. The text says, There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test him and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

The Shema, a summary of the law known to every Jew, is quoted by the scholar. Note how often the word “all” occurs. There is a radical nature to the call of love that cannot be avoided. When it comes to love, the requirement is not to give what is reasonable, to give a little, or perhaps to give a tithe. No, the call is to give God all our heart, mind, being, and strength, and to love our neighbor as though he were our very self.

As we shall see in a moment, our flesh recoils at this sort of open demand; immediately we want to qualify it and quantify it somehow. The flesh seeks refuge in law, asking, “What is the minimum I can do while still meeting the requirements?”

But love is by its very nature open-ended and generous. Love is extravagant; it wants to do more. Love wants to please the beloved. A young man in love does not say to himself, “What is the cheapest gift I can get her for her birthday?” No, he will see an opportunity to show his love; he may even spend too much. Love does not think, “What is the least I can do?” Love thinks, “What more can I do?” Love is expansive and extravagant.

And thus the great Shema speaks to the open-ended and extravagant quality of love.

But the flesh, that fallen and sin-soaked part of our nature, recoils at such expansive talk and brings out the lawyer in us, negotiating for lesser terms.

II. The Reductionism that Resists Love – After giving the beautiful answer about love, the lawyer (and there is a lawyer in all of us) now reverts to form and speaks out of his flesh. The text continues, But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

In other words, he wants to say, “Look, if I have to love my neighbor, let’s make this category as small and manageable as possible.”

Note how quickly he has retreated into a kind of fearful reaction to the broad expanse of love. His fear is likely rooted in the fact that he has reduced the Shema into a moralism, as if he could pull the whole thing off out of his own power. And so he recoils and demands more favorable terms of surrender. Because he thinks he has to do it all, he needs to get its scope into the range of something he can manage on his own. Perhaps he is willing to consider the people on his block to be his neighbors, but those two or three blocks away? That’s just too much.

The fearful lawyer in him has started negotiating a kind of “debt relief.” He seeks to “define down” the category “neighbor.” But the Lord is not buying it; He will expand the concept even further than the Jewish notions of the day.

To be fair to the lawyer in this passage, there is a lawyer in all of us, negotiating for favorable terms. And while it is not wrong for us to ask for some guidance in specifying the law, we all know that the lawyer in us is really trying more to evade the demands than to fulfill them.

In a way we are all like the typical teenager. Every teenager is a natural lawyer. Give a teenager a rule and he will parse every nuance of it in order to evade its demands or to water it down.

Some years ago I was teaching 7th grade religion in our parish’s Catholic school. I told the kids, “Do your work … and no talking!” Within moments, a young lady started singing. Interestingly, her name was Carmen (which means song in Latin). When I rebuked her for breaking the rule she replied, “I wasn’t talking; I was singing … and you didn’t say anything about singing.”  Yes, she was a natural born lawyer.

I remember my thoughts when I was in high school: I couldn’t break the 6^th Commandment (forbidding adultery) because I wasn’t married and certainly wouldn’t be intimate with a married woman since they were all “old.” Yes, the lawyer was at work in me, but was answered by Jesus in Matthew 5:27-30.

This is how we are in our rebellious, fearful, and resentful flesh. Hearing a law, we go to work at once and seek to over-specify it, to parse every word, to seek every nuance so as to evade its intent in every way possible. If we are going to follow it at all, we’re going to try to find a way that involves the minimum effort on our part.

So often Catholics and other Christians talk more like lawyers than lovers: “Do I have to go to confession? How often? Do I have to pray? How long? Do I have to give to the poor? How much? Why can’t I do that? It’s not so bad; besides, everyone else is doing it.”

Sometimes, too, we seek to reduce holiness to perfunctory religious observance. Look, I go to Mass; I put something in the collection basket; I say my prayers. What more do you want? Perhaps we think that if we do certain ritual observances (which are good in themselves) we have bought God off and do not need to look at other matters in our life. Because I go to Mass and say a few prayers, I can put a check mark in the “God box” and don’t really need to look at my lack of forgiveness, my harsh tongue, or my lack of generosity.

This is reductionism. It is the lawyer in us at work, seeking to avoid the extravagance of love by hiding behind legal minimalism. It emerges from a kind of fear generated by the notion that I must be able to do everything on my own, by the power of my own flesh. But that’s not possible. You can’t pull it off on your own. But God can, and that is why He commands it of us.

Our fleshly notions have to die. Our spirit must come alive with the virtue of hope that relies trustingly on God’s grace to bring out a vigorous and loving response in us. Law and the flesh say, “What are the minimum requirements?” Love says, “What more can I do?” This is the gift of a loving heart that we must seek.

III. The Response that Reflects Love – The Lord then paints a picture of what his love and grace can do in someone: Jesus replied, “A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise, a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn, and cared for him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’ Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

There is a very important phrase that must not be missed, for it gives the key to the Samaritan man’s actions: “[he] was moved.” Note that the verb “was moved” is in the passive voice. That is to say it was not so much that he acted, but that he was acted upon.

More specifically, love and grace have moved within him and are moving him. The Greek verb here is ἐσπλαγχνίσθη (esplagchnisthe), a third person singular passive verb meaning “to be deeply moved” or “to be moved to compassion.” The verb is also in the aorist tense, signifying that something has happened but also that it has a kind of ongoing

Why is this phrase “was moved” so important? Because it indicates for us the power of the gift of grace. So many of our fears about what God asks and what love demands are rooted in the idea that we must accomplish them out of our own flesh. No, that is not the Gospel. In the New Covenant the keeping of the Law is received, not achieved. The keeping of the commandments is a work of God within us to which we yield. To keep the commandments and to fulfill the law is the result of love, not the cause of it.

We do not know the Samaritan’s history; the Lord does not supply it. And because this is only a story, the Samaritan is only a literary figure.

But for us the teaching must be clearly understood: Our receiving and experiencing of love is and must be the basis of our keeping of the law. Experiencing and receiving God’s love for us equips, empowers, and enables us to respond extravagantly as joyful lovers rather than as fearful lawyers.

Love lightens every load. When we love God and love other people, we want to do what love requires. Even if there are difficulties that must be overcome, love makes us eager to respond anyway.

When I was in the 7th grade, I found myself quite taken by a pretty girl named Shelly. I was quite “in love.” One day she was walking down the hall trying to carry a pile of books to the library; I saw my chance! I offered to carry those books at once. Now I was skinny as a rail with no muscles at all, and in those days the books were heavy. But I was glad to do it despite the effort. Love does that; it lightens every load and makes us eager to help, even at great cost.

Perhaps it’s just a silly story of an awkward teenager, but it demonstrates what love does. It “moves” us to be generous, kind, merciful, patient, and even extravagant. We don’t do what we do because we have to, but because we want to.

The Samaritan in this story, was “moved” with and by love to overcome race, nation, fear, and danger. He generously gave his time and money to save a brother and fellow traveler.

Let love lift you. Let it empower you, equip you, and enable you! Go to the Lord and pray for a deeper experience of His love. Open the door of your heart and let the love of God in. Go to the foot of the cross and remember what the Lord has done for you. Let what He has done be so present in your mind and heart that you are grateful and different. Let God’s love come alive in you.

As a witness, I promise you that love lightens every load and makes us eager to keep the commandments, to help others, to forgive, to show mercy, to be patient and kind, and to courageously speak the truth in love to others. Yes, I am a witness that love can and does change us. I’m not what I want to be, but I am not what I used to be. Love has lifted me and lightened every load of mine.

Again, today’s Gospel is not a mere moralism. The main point is that we must let the Lord’s love into our heart. If we do, we will do what love does and we will do it extravagantly—not because we have to, but because we want to.

The grace of love lightens every load and equips us for every good work.

This song says, “More of his saving fullness see, more of his love who died for me.”