E hiki mai kou aupuni
Here is the prepared text of the homily delivered Oct. 25, the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, during Bishop Castori’s Mass of thanksgiving at Sacred Hearts Church in Lanai City.
Exodus 22; Psalm 18; 1 Thessalonians 1; Matthew 22
Sometimes we look upon the commandments mainly as obligations, that is, as laws to fulfill in obedience to God. The commandments are indeed obligations, but that definition is not an adequate way to understand them.
Indeed, if we view the commandments in their entirety — those that God spoke to Moses on Sinai; those that Jesus taught and interpreted through his preaching and mighty acts among us — if we view them merely as duties to fulfill, like paying taxes, we deprive ourselves of their fundamental grace, which is their wondrous power to bring us into deeper intimacy with God himself.
Such grace was, after all, at the heart of Jesus’ teaching on the commandments. So much so, that I believe that if we were sitting in the temple precincts with Jesus himself at this moment, and if he himself picked up and paged through this lectionary of ours, today’s readings on the two great commandments would still be among the first teachings he would give us.
Now Jesus was not actually the only teacher in Israel to link the two great commandments — “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind” (from Deuteronomy) with “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (from Leviticus). But the revelation that emerges from Jesus’ lips was the distinctive way in which he linked the two commandments, that is, with a brief but crucial preposition, when he taught that the second commandment is “like unto” the first.
It’s really just one word (in the language Jesus spoke) in his teaching, and it’s so easy to miss, when he says that the second commandment is “like unto” the first, but therein lies the revelation, since this way of joining the two commandments leads us to an intimate knowledge of God’s very nature. For to love others, Jesus teaches, is to love God himself, who created all life.
Today’s first reading from the book of Exodus gives us the key to grasping this “likeness” that Jesus taught between the two commandments. And that key is empathy.
Not simply sympathy, not simply feeling sorrow or pity for someone in distress, but empathy, that is to say, entering into the feelings of the other so deeply that they truly become one’s own. In the words of the American poet Walt Whitman: “I do not ask a wounded person how he feels; I myself become the wounded person.”
That is empathy. Now consider how the word of God, in the passage we heard from Exodus, expresses such empathy in the commandment that God gives to Israel. Thus says the Lord: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien [meaning a migrant or refugee]. For you yourselves were once aliens in the land of Egypt.” So the commandment to show kindness to the stranger is not simply an obligation or a duty; it appeals to our humanity, to our shared experience with other human beings, so that we truly say, “There, but by the grace of God, go I!”
Moreover, as the Lord expands on this and the other commandments that follow it, which describe the various ways in which we are commanded to love our neighbor, the Lord reveals that he himself is the source of this empathy, so that we understand that empathy is not only human; it is divine.
For example, on the commandment regarding the cloak that a lender takes from someone who is in debt, God invites us into the movement of his own heart in responding to the misfortune of the indebted person. As we heard, the Lord says, “This cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in? If he cries out to me, I will hear him.” These are the words the Lord himself spoke in giving us the commandments!
It is revealed to us, then, that when we identify with the feelings of someone who is poor or deprived — when we make his or her hardship our own — we share in what God actually feels for him or her. Therefore, acts of charity that flow from empathy not only enable us to share the feelings of others; they place us within God’s own heart.
And, of course, Jesus, the son of God — being fully human and fully divine — understood this truth, this joining of the human and the divine, infinitely better than anyone else ever could. Thus, Jesus brings the commandment of loving neighbor into the realm of loving God, saying that the second is “like” the first.
In taking flesh, Jesus actually becomes the connection between the two: He is the incarnation of the second commandment’s “like unto” the first’s. So the degree to which we assume the suffering of others, especially the least among us, is the degree to which we share in the mercy and the life of God himself.
And you can see how this transforms our understanding of all of the commandments that follow from that of loving our neighbor. They are not simply obligations to fulfill in order to prove that we are good and obedient Christians; they are the entrance that Jesus gives us into the life of God, to being empathetic not only with our neighbor, but with God himself. Thereby do we become, as St. Paul writes to the Thessalonians, truly “imitators of the Lord.”
And the holy Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ poured out in his perfect sharing of human woundedness, gives us grace to say “yes” at every turn to this invitation into God’s heart. The Eucharist fills us with the grace to ask the very questions that God himself asks as he beholds his beloved children.
In the face of poverty, violence, homelessness, the food insecurity that has increased even in our own communities, we are joined to the Lord in asking with the words that he himself asked in Exodus: “What does he have to sleep in? Who will feed him? If he cries out to me, I will hear him.”
And in growing in such empathy, we shall be greatly inspired and helped by our saints of Hawaii, Damien of Molokai and Marianne Cope, who won the crown of sanctity precisely through their holy empathy. How perfectly did St. Damien express the empathy of God (using the language of his time with regard to those with Hansen’s disease): “I make myself a leper with lepers to gain all to Christ.” So, again, to cite Walt Whitman, “I do not ask a wounded person how he feels; I become the wounded person.”
And how fitting that these saints who so embody divine empathy should have lived and loved and died in the very land whose notion of ohana extends brotherhood and sisterhood beyond blood relationship so as to value the entire community in its interconnectedness, reverencing the responsibility that each of us has for the other. No wonder our Catholic faith has flourished in these islands for two centuries!
And so, brothers and sisters, in building the Kingdom of God, let us shine this light of divine empathy in our midst and on the world, walking in the steps of Sts. Damien and Marianne, becoming, like Christ himself, the “like unto” of love of God and love of neighbor.
Devotedly in Christ,
Bishop Michael