THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH Her Doctrine and Morals Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost 16 September 2012

The Sunday Sermon

Dear Friends,

Jesus has a couple of very important things to teach us in today’s gospel. The first is the proper keeping of the Sabbath. The Israelites of the Old Testament were bound by a physical or material law and more often than not they were completely blind to the spiritual side of the law or how the physical acts were to carry over into spiritual ones. Christ has entered a home to eat bread on a Sabbath. The letter of the law forbids servile work on this day. They were eagerly waiting to see if Jesus would heal a man and ignore the law of the Sabbath or whether He would let pass an opportunity to perform a charitable work of mercy. Reading their hearts Jesus responds to their question. He asks them if they would not come to the aid of cattle on the Sabbath. The answer is obvious – every one of them would rescue a beast that was in need of aid even if it were the Sabbath. None of them stopped to consider that this diseased man is worth much more than their cattle or that charity is much more important than their avarice. (The need for saving cattle is because cattle are expensive and it would be a great loss to the owner to lose one.) There is not much selfish profit in helping one’s neighbor, but there is profit in saving and protecting one’s livestock. So they were all willing to break the letter of the law for avarice, but never for charity towards a fellow human being in need. Christ in healing this man shows them and us that charity knows no law nor does it need any law. There can be no law against loving our neighbors and always seeking to help them in any way we can.

Our society today is too often more like the Pharisees than like Christ. We are always finding reasons not to be charitable towards one another. There are always many “prudent” reasons for us not to help one another, but the most shocking is when we attempt to place the blame upon God as they did in today’s gospel. It was because of the law that God had given them that they did not wish to practice charity to the ill man. We see the same today. The temptation for many is to reason that God is the cause for our neighbor’s misfortune or need and therefore if we come to their aid we are going against God’s will. Not many people will verbalize this thought, just as the men in today’s gospel could not answer out loud and so remained silent. Nonetheless, we attempt to excuse our laziness, coldness or indifference with a cloak of religiosity and ultimately blame God for it all.

Such religiosity attempts to appear as scrupulous keepers of God’s law and therefore righteous in the eyes of all while at the same time not understanding the law at all and often abusing the law in a much worse way than the men that they condemn. We must therefore look to the spirit of the law rather than to the letter. It is only when we receive the law in all charity that we understand and can properly apply it. It is charity that distinguishes true obedience from servile obedience. Only those who love God and their neighbors know how to understand and apply the law of God.

The second lesson that Jesus has for us today is closely related to the first one. While charity allows us to comprehend and apply God’s words, it is humility that allows us to manifest this charity in all its beauty and simplicity. We often see people who strive very hard to appear humble while they are truly more proud than those around them. Such people will fight for the last place so that they may appear to be the humblest of all. In all actuality though they are truly the proudest of all. It does not matter if we are striving for the first or the last place they are both detrimental to us if we lack true humility and charity. The truly charitable and humble person does not desire to be seen in the first place or to draw attention to himself in the last place, but is rather desirous not to be seen or noticed so as to draw attention to himself. The humble do not desire or seek the attention of others for they truly consider everyone above them, and in their charity concern themselves only with serving God and leading others to God.

All the virtues come as a package; we cannot have one without possessing the others to some degree. Today we have been shown that charity and humility go hand in hand. We cannot humble ourselves to one another unless we truly love one another. We cannot love one another unless we are willing to humble ourselves to one another. In the pursuit of the greatest of virtues – charity – we will come to practice all of the others. May we always seek to grow in charity day by day and make ourselves more and more humble and therefore more and more pleasing to God and to one another.