Homily for the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 3, 2024
Casa Santa Maria
Rome, Italy

Deuteronomy 6:2-6
Psalm 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 12:28b-34

The readings of today’s liturgy invite us to ruminate on the significance of repetition in the spiritual life and ministry of priests in leading Christ’s flock as shepherds after His own heart. The first reading from Deuteronomy commands Israel to repeat the words of the Shema every day. Jesus Himself repeats the words of Deuteronomy in answering the Scribe’s theological question, while the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the unrepeatable character of Christ’s eternal sacrifice.

There is a distinction to be made between redundancy and repetition. Redundancy in the Catholic spiritual life is akin to a popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly in attempting to forge through our own willpower a different result each time we do the same thing. It is what happens when we approach our ministerial obligations without gratitude to God. On the contrary, repetition in the priest’s spiritual life develops our incorporation into the mystery of God, freely offered and fully revealed in Jesus Christ. Repetition fosters the formation of our character with every full human virtue exemplified in Jesus Christ. For us priests, repetition fosters our full configuration with Jesus Christ, Head and Shepherd of His Church, and permits us to lead Christ’s flock more deeply into the mystery of our salvation accomplished once and for all by His eternal sacrifice.

We read in the first reading from Deuteronomy, “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today.” Deuteronomy continues, “Keep repeating them to your children. Recite them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them on your arm as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.”

These words of prayer given by God through Moses to the Jewish people are given for the purpose of repetition so that they never forget that the covenantal character of the relationship between the Lord and His people, made at God’s initiative and requiring a full response on the part of Israel, is replete with justice and love. This prayer makes present the basics of the Covenant to which they must return regularly — love of God in response to His initial and overwhelming love. The entire person is imbued with the truth of God in this response — the mind, the soul, and one’s entire possessions are transformed repeatedly through its repetition.

As Pope Francis observed about this spiritual endeavor, “For the Word of the Lord cannot be received as any other type of news. The Word of the Lord should be repeated, made one’s own, safeguarded. The monastic tradition of the monks uses an audacious but very concrete term. It goes like this: the Word of God must be ‘ruminated.’ ‘To ruminate’ the Word of God. We could say that it is so nutritious that it must reach every aspect of life: to involve, as Jesus says today, the entire heart, the entire soul, the entire mind, all of our strength.”

Salvation history shows us that while the Lord remains just and faithful to His side of the Covenant, Israel periodically forgets the Covenant and the Lord through idolatry. This inadequacy prompts the priests of the Temple to offer sacrifice to purify their own personal defilement and then again to atone for the defilement on the part of Israel committed as an injustice to what the Lord is justly owed. Yet, we must be careful to avoid the oversimplification claimed by too many Christians that the Hebrew Scriptures present a God of justice but say little of His mercy, while the New Testament speaks only of a loving and merciful God. For in His response to the scribe in today’s Gospel, Jesus in proclaiming the great commandment of love of God and neighbor repeats the words of Moses from Deuteronomy.

This conversation between Jesus and the scribe as recorded in Mark’s Gospel occurs on the third day of the final week in Jerusalem before the events of His Passion. It indicates the priority of love for both God and neighbor in Jesus’ teaching. The scribe is asking Jesus a common question of study of the Law among the scribes and pharisees. There were about 613 commands and obligations deduced from the stories and rules presented in the Torah, so it is understandable that believers would seek to know which held priority in importance among them.

Jesus’ response to the scribe is not simply exegetical. He responds with an emphatic urgency when we consider the timing of this conversation taking place immediately before the events of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Jesus’ teaching that the two commandments of love for God and love for neighbor are fused together indicates the type of love that He will exercise and reveal during the events of His Passion. It is the love that will be made present throughout His presence and permeate the ministry entrusted to His Church for all time. His words and actions are far from redundant and are to be repeated in a distinct manner by Christ’s Church and particularly by those of us ordained into the ministerial priesthood. As we just listened to the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, “He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; He did that once for all when He offered Himself.”

The Church insists that the daily repetition of the Eucharist does not duplicate or repeat Christ’s singular action but rather renews it and extends it to a new group of people in need of transformation by the presence of Christ the great high priest in their midst. The author of Hebrews presents idealized qualities that emphasize its distance from the genuine experience of humanity — holy, righteous, undefiled, and far from sinners. Yet, it is the accomplishment of Christ who authentically embodies these qualities in full humanity that transforms them from being ideal abstractions and through His merits makes them truly accessible for human beings to perform. This is accomplished through the liturgical actions of the priest at Mass, so that the members of the Church might be able to love as Christ loves through the nourishment of Word and Sacrament.

Saint Thomas Aquinas put forth that the words of consecration expressed by the priest at Mass are now spoken as though spoken by Christ himself: “The minister who accomplishes this sacrament does nothing except to state the words of Christ.” In the Third Part of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas explicitly distinguishes between the consecration, which is carried out by the priest in persona Christi, and the other prayers of the Mass which the priest prays in persona Ecclesiae. This insight underscores the unrepeatable sacrifice of Christ that is accomplished for the salvation of all always and everywhere, and that Mass is not simply a dramatic reenactment of the Last Supper.

Instead, this speaks to the repetition of the once for all sacrifice of Christ as anticipated and received by Christ at the Last Supper as the will of the Father. To paraphrase the words of the philosopher Robert Sokolowski, at Mass, “through our quotation of Christ’s words, priests join in the perspective Christ had on the event that was to take place and that has taken place.” In the words of Saint John Chrysostom, the priest “lends his tongue and gives his hand to Christ: his tongue allows Christ’s words to be stated again, and his hand allows Christ’s gesture of taking the bread and wine to be carried out again.” This is beyond mere imitation.

We have moments ago prayed together in our responsorial psalm, these words of the Eighteenth Psalm, “I love you Lord, my strength.” For us to mean these words requires that we priests be emptied of our biases and interests, and of ourselves by ruminating on the words of Christ in preparation for the celebration of Mass. We are emptied through a type of kenosis in our graced configuration to Christ that Christ might be heard again in the words that He speaks through the lending of our voices and hands to His unrepeatable sacrifice that accomplishes lasting justice and Divine love. For Christ “has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; He did that once for all when He offered Himself.”