To Know, Love and Serve
Homily for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B)
“Be doers of the word and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22)
I’m going to ask a question and maybe reveal the generational makeup of the congregation here. What is the purpose of man?
Catholics who grew up at a certain time will recognize that as the first question of the old Baltimore catechism, which was the standard text for religious education in the Catholic Church in the US for a long time. The answer to the question is the purpose of man is to know, love and serve God in this life so that we might be happy with him forever in the next. To know, love and serve God. I want that to be the backdrop of the homily today — our purpose is to know, love, and serve God.
The readings for today are all about the importance of putting our faith into action; of really living by the principles that we teach. In the first reading Moses tells the people to hear and to obey the statutes he is teaching them to observe (Dt 4:1). To both hear and to obey. In the second reading, James tells us to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” lest we delude ourselves (Jas 1:22). If we don’t walk the walk as well as talk the talk, then we will end up being like the hypocrites Jesus denounces in the gospel today, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mk 7:6).
Let’s break this down a little bit. It is important that we know the faith. That’s part of the purpose of this life, isn’t it: to know, love and serve the Lord. So it’s important for us to know the ways of the Lord and we are blessed with an embarrassment of riches today when it comes to resources to help us do that. But that alone is not enough. We have to put the faith into action.
This comes out in service of the Lord. And there are many ways to serve the Lord. Coming to Mass to pray and worship is one way — one very important way — of serving the Lord. We serve him in our liturgy. But we also serve him when we serve the images of Him who are sitting all around us, and whom we meet every day on the streets, at our jobs, and in our communities. Moses instructed the Israelites to obey the commandments of the Lord and the commandments include not only the commands to worship God and honor him but also to treat our neighbors with charity and justice. And so, as St. James writes, “Religion that is pure and undefiled [is] to care for orphans and widows in their affliction” (Jas 1:27).
I’m not telling any of you things that you don’t already know. I don’t think anyone here doesn’t understand the importance of knowing the faith, and I don’t think anyone here would say it’s enough to know the faith without actually living it out in practice. I’m just laying out what the readings make clear. We have to know and serve the Lord. Know and serve. But wait… there’s something still missing from that equation, isn’t there? What’s missing? Love.
We have to know, love and serve the Lord. Well, what if we have two out of three? Nope. That’s not going to hack it. All three are important, and if you believe what St. Paul writes, the greatest of these is love (cf. 1 Cor 13:13). Love is the key. Love is the bridge that connects knowledge and service of God. Have you ever met someone — and I think we’ve all been this person at some point in our lives, I know I have — who knows the faith, at least well enough to know what they are supposed to do, but who just can’t seem to want to live it out? Love is the missing piece. Love is what is going to get the faith to move from your head, through your heart, out into your hands and feet.
Because just pure knowledge of the faith isn’t enough. And we know this. How else do you explain the phenomenon of atheist scripture scholars? There is no shortage of them in academia. Smart people, brilliant people, who have studied the Word of God for decades, who know much more about the Bible than you or I do, and yet they don’t believe. How can that be possible? Because for them the Bible is merely an historic text. It’s not a love-letter from their Creator. It’s an academic exercise, and not a personal story of relevance to them. They may know plenty of things about God, but they don’t love God.
And we could say the same thing about service without love. If you are serving God at Mass or even in your private religious devotions, but you’re doing it without love, then you are like those Pharisees Jesus denounces who keep the traditions of the elders, but inside are dead like whitewashed tombs. We can even serve our neighbor without love. If you are performing charitable acts but don’t actually care about the people you are serving, then that’s not really charity, it’s virtue signaling. For years I’ve brought college students to The Community Table once a week to serve food to the hungry. Some students come because they want to help the poor; others come because they’re in a program that requires service hours. There is a difference. I’m not saying it’s bad to volunteer because you need service hours, but you should be doing it with love, as well.
Because without love we have nothing. In his first letter to the Corinthians, after St. Paul speaks about the many and varied gifts different members of the Church have which we are to use in the service of God, he goes on to say:
If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing (1 Cor 13:1-4).
So if you write that big check to the St. Vincent de Paul Society not because you love the poor, but because you need a tax write-off, you gain nothing. If you volunteer at the soup kitchen not because you love the hungry but so that you can post about it on Instagram and get a bunch of likes, you gain nothing. Just like St. James writes that faith without works is dead (Jas 2:6), so we can also say works without love are dead.
Love is more than important. It is essential. So what is love? It’s one thing to say we ought to have it, but what is it, and how do we obtain it if it is lacking? Well, there are many different ways to try to define love. For the purpose of this homily, I will limit myself to two aspects.
First, love is a desire, but not an emotion. What does that mean? It means love is something that moves the heart. We feel an attraction to the thing we love, the person we love, the quality we love. We are drawn toward it. But it is more than an emotional attraction. Emotions are fleeting. We might feel a certain way one moment and feel completely different the next. Throughout the scriptures we are commanded to love, and you can’t command someone to have a feeling. So love is a desire, but not a feeling.
And that’s my second point, which is that love is an act of the will. It is something we can choose. And what that means for us is this: we can choose to love God or not love God. We can choose to love our neighbor or not love our neighbor, regardless of how we might feel about them. In other words, you can desire to desire God. I’ll say that again; you can desire to desire God.
In other words, you can recognize in your heart that you don’t love God the way you ought to. Or that you don’t love your neighbor as much as you should. But if you know in your mind that you should desire God more, then you can direct your will toward that end. If you know you should desire God more and you want to desire Him more, then that is an act of love, or at least the beginnings of love. You can pray to God, “Lord, increase my desire for you.” If you struggle to believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, you can pray, “Lord, help my unbelief.” If you struggle to feel affection or compassion for the sick, the homeless, or the mentally ill, you can pray, “Lord, help me to love those in need with a pure heart.” And God will soften your heart.
We find this to be true even in our human relationships. I remember several years ago reading a story in a secular magazine written by a man who was in a troubled marriage. He and his wife had gone for many years growing apart, barely talking with each other except to argue, not treating each other with love and respect, and one day his wife came to him asking for a divorce. That moment spurred a conversion of sorts for him because, while he had no affection for his wife, he also did not want his marriage to end that way. So he asked for three months before they made a decision. His wife didn’t understand why that would make a difference, but granted his request.
So over the course of the next 90 days, this man decided that he would simply act like he loved his wife. He knew that he did not love her the way that he should — but he also knew that he should. So he decided to act as though he did and treat her in a loving way. What he discovered was that over the following days and weeks his heart was softened and he actually began to feel love and affection for her once more. And more than that, because of his actions, his wife’s heart was also softened and she began to feel love for her husband return. At the end of the three months, their marriage was far from perfect. They still had a lot of work to do, but they were willing to do that work.
Perhaps some of you are in a similar situation in your relationship with God. You can do something similar. You can pray for the desire to love God more, and then begin acting as though you did, and God will, over time, soften your heart. Why does this work? Because in the desire to desire what you know you should desire, you are starting to align your will to God.
And that’s what Christian love truly is. It is aligning your will to the will of God. Wanting what God wants. Loving what God loves. This is the purity of heart that Jesus speaks of in the gospel. That’s the love that connects our knowledge of God and our service of God, and gives them meaning and purpose — that gives them the power to transform us into other Christs.
And so let us pray each day, “Lord, purify my heart. Purify my intentions. Increase my desire for you, so that I may know you and serve you as best as I can in this life, so that I may love you and be loved by you not only in this life, but for all eternity. Amen.”