A Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Exodus 22:20-26 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10 Matthew 22:34-40
His family disowned him in every sense. They severed all contact and stripped him of his livelihood. Gonzalo had worked as an accountant for his wealthier relatives, but after marrying Catalina, an orphan from a humbler background, he was forced to join her as a weaver.
Sixteen years later, Gonzalo was dead, leaving Catalina with three sons, one of whom probably died of malnourishment due to the family’s poverty.
It is easy to imagine Catalina, raising her sons on the story of their father, sacrificing everything for love. Indeed, years later her son Juan would pen this singular statement: “Where there is no love, put love in, and you will draw love out.”
Juan received a first-class education, a gift of charity, with the newly established Society of Jesus. He fell in love with Jesus and was determined to give him everything. Juan thought about becoming a Carthusian monk. The austerity, the silence and the life of contemplative prayer appealed to him. Instead, he became a Carmelite friar, the most famous his order ever produced.
We call him St. John of the Cross. That might suggest a harsh, even dour message, but John’s mother had raised an incurable romantic. God possesses every perfection, but, as the great Benedictine spiritual master Blessed Columba Marmion pointed out, most of us confine ourselves to one or another. John constantly called the humanity of Jesus to mind and heart. If the man he loved had died on a cross, John was going to be there with him.
Where there is no love, put love in, and you will draw love out.
Is that not what Jesus did? Rejected, convicted and abandoned, he died on the cross, loving to the end.
John’s own life would follow this pattern. His mentor, St. Teresa of Ávila, convinced him to bring her reforms to the male branch of the Carmelite order. John embraced greater poverty and more profound silence.
Not all his brothers agreed. Accusing John of disobedience, they repeatedly lashed him, confined him to a six-by-10-foot cell and fed him a meager diet. Although he could barely find enough light to read his prayers, he composed his most famous poem during his imprisonment: “The Spiritual Canticle,” a classic of Spanish literature. It begins:
Where have You hidden Yourself,
And abandoned me in my groaning, O my Beloved?
You have fled like the hart,
Having wounded me.
I ran after You, crying; but You were gone.
Christ had died abandoned. John would follow him, even if sometimes it felt as though the Lord himself had abandoned John. But that was the point: Faith for John represented surrender to God in absolute darkness. Christ had closed his eyes for the last time, having every reason to believe that his beloved Father had abandoned him, but still he clung on. John wanted the same.
Where there is no love, put love in, and you will draw love out.
John would escape his imprisonment. He would go on to reform his order and write rather complex classics of the spiritual life. But John learned the core of his teaching on his mother’s knee. His father had given away everything for love. His Lord Jesus had done the same. True Christian faith dwells in darkness; true Christian discipleship abandons itself.
Where there is no love, put love in, and you will draw love out.
When asked which was the greatest of the commandments, our Lord answered:
You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments (Mt 22:37-40).
The message seems too stark to be successful. Our neighbors, the people who fill our lives, are simply not that lovable. And God, where is he? If God were only a bit more present, a bit more gracious to us, we might be able to fulfill these two great commands.
But, you see, the Gospel is a wager before it is a creed. What are we willing to give for love? John of the Cross, his father Gonzalo and their Lord Jesus were willing to bet it all.
Where there is no love, put love in, and you will draw love out.
Were they wrong? Place your bet.
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