Homily – 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 10/25/2026

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Good afternoon! Happy Sunday to y’all. So first of all, I wanted to thank all our parishioners who came to the absolutely wonderful parish mission. It was delightful to see our church pretty full outside of Sunday, and as many of you said to me, Father Patraganya was such an inspiration, and he really helped deepen your relationship and intimacy with God, right? As with any personal relationship, going deep with someone takes time with that person, and we as a parish spent three straight nights together in growing intimacy with our Lord, and those two hours each night gave Father Patrick the time not just to talk about being closer to God, but to actually show us how, and it was awesome, right? And to transition in today’s gospel message, Father Patrick helped us with how to love God in everyday life.

So we are in the same chapter in Matthew 22 as last Sunday, and throughout this chapter, Jesus is being challenged by these strange bedfellows. On one hand the Pharisees, on the other the Sadducees, and normally the Pharisees and Sadducees are bitter rivals, worse than Ohio State and Michigan, right? And but in Jesus they found a common enemy, a common threat to their power, and so in an effort to trap Jesus they give him a whole line of questioning, and this Sunday we hear that line of questioning culminate to the one question we heard today, Rabbi which commandment of the law is the greatest? And Jesus responds not with one, but two of the greatest commandments, because these two commandments are inseparable, and sum up the entire law and prophets. So what’s the first one? We should all know this by heart, right? You shall love the Lord your God with all your, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

Yes. So we want to take a look at what loving God with each of those three really means, actually means. So what does it mean to love God with all our heart? Your heart is symbolic of your will, where your desires are.

The heart is the seat of your affections and your core motivation in life. As Jesus himself said, for where your treasure is there also will your heart be. And so your heart is what shapes the direction of how you use your free will, and thus your decisions and actions.

So what is the deepest heartfelt desire? It can, these desires can even overcome what we logically know, or as think as common sense, because we’re so relational we’ll choose the heart over the mind oftentimes. And so what is your deepest heartfelt desire? Is it God? Do you love your spouse or your children more than God himself, whom you’re called to be with for all eternity? Is it yourself? You know, in a narcissistic society today this is a popular one. You know, I’m the one who calls the shots in my life and I don’t care what your God or your Bible says about it.

Or maybe I’ll just give a token nod to it at Christmas and Easter. So who is it that sits on the throne of your heart? If it’s someone other than God, whether it’s you or another person, that person is an idol that has become your God. So do we have more affection, another way to put it, do we have more affection for the Creator or for one of his creatures? Number two, what does it mean to love God with all your soul? The Hebrew word for soul in this verse is nefesh, which means life.

And so the soul is symbolic of your life in its entirety, our entire being. We are to love God with all that we are. So why is loving God with all that we are an important distinction? Well, because if we love God with just some of who we are, we become divided persons, frustrated beings, right? God just doesn’t become one of our loves, you know, God becomes just one of our loves that we have to fit into our already busy life.

Listen now, because this is what can make loving God feel like a burden, if God becomes just one of our loves among many, instead of our one and only love, then God becomes a competitor for our loyalty and a competitor for our time, right? I love my wife, I love my kids, I love golf, I love pizza, I love watching football, I love coaching the kids, I love the fall colors, oh I love God too. I love my team at work, I love hunting and fishing, I love volunteering as a knight. If God is just one of those loves, then He is not God at all for us, right? But if God were our one and only love, if we love Him with all our soul and all that we are, then God gives us an integrity of life, an integrity of being by which He rightly orders all our other loves.

So we love all other things in our life in the manner and degree that we should love them, right? Our spouse, our children, our work, our hobbies, our involvement in the community, our friends and fellow brothers and sisters in the faith, etc. And because God is the source of love and love itself, we in fact can love all the other people in our life with a far deeper love than if God was not all in all in our life. So His grace in our life is real power.

Number three, what does it mean to love God with all our mind? So this means loving God with our intellect, and the intellect is our cognitive power to know and understand the truth of things. When we don’t love God with all our mind, we refuse to recognize what is true or false or what is right and wrong as God intended. Remember Adam and Eve when they ate the fruit of the only tree in all of paradise that God had forbidden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

They tried to usurp a prerogative that belonged to God alone, and as a result their intellects were darkened and their hearts hardened. But Jesus would come to bring the light of His truth and to give them a new heart with which to love. So then Jesus didn’t stop at the first and greatest commandment, He also gave us the second, you shall love the Lord, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

If you say you love God, then you also need to love the people that God loves and for whom Jesus laid down His life, that is you and me and all of humanity. We can’t say we love God if we despise or neglect the very people He holds dear. So now take those two together and you have, as Jesus pointed out, summed up the entire law.

More specifically, it sums up the Decalogue, which is the Ten Commandments, right? So notice that Jesus did not use any of those ten of the greatest commandments as the answer to the question in today’s Gospel, He used the Shema. Why? Well because the love of God and the love of neighbor are the essence of all ten of those commandments. They undergird or provide the foundation for those Ten Commandments and the motive we should have behind those Ten Commandments.

Remember that God had inscribed the commandments not on one but on two tablets. One tablet had the first three commandments that dealt with the love of God, the other tablet had seven, right, that dealt with the love of neighbor. And that the Ten Commandments then are the concrete expressions of the love of God and neighbor.

In other words, they spell out what it means to truly what truly love entails with that with regards to them. And so without these concrete commandments we may be loving not the God who has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ, but instead love a God of our own making in which we fashion God into our image instead of allowing God to fashion us in his. So the first commandment is against idolatry, right? You shall have no other gods before me, whether it’s another human being or ourselves or a God of our own making.

The second commandment, you shall not love, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. This is a huge problem even among practicing Catholics, right? Because it’s so ubiquitous in our pop culture we irreverence, we irreverently say OMG like it’s no big deal. It’s so ingrained in some of us that sometimes we don’t even realize we’re saying it, right? But folks it’s one of the ten biggies.

And so we need to charitably remind one another if you say you love God then you better not abuse his name, his holy name. The Jews don’t even say his holy name, they have a tetragrammaton for that, right? Y-H-W-H. So the third commandment, remember to keep the Lord’s Day holy.

Another huge one these days just as we treat, sometimes treat God’s name as if it was just another word, we can sometimes treat Sunday as if it was just another day, right? I’m preaching to the choir because you’re here, but how can we say we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength if we can’t even choose to do that for an hour and a half on the specific day that God commands us to be with him in worship? So whatever it is that we choose to do on Lord’s Day in place of our Sunday worship, that too has become an idol that has replaced God. That’s grave stuff, which is why we need to avail ourselves of the sacrament of reconciliation before we start receiving Jesus in the Eucharist again. But even if you haven’t had a chance to do so, please still come to mass and do a spiritual communion, right? Jesus just wants you here at the family gathering.

Now due to time we won’t go over the love of neighbor because today was focused on that first and greatest commandment, what it means to love God. But I do want to emphasize what our own patron saint, John the Evangelist, wrote. If anyone, in 1st John, if anyone says, I love God but hates his brother, he is a liar, right? If you take kind of like a just God and me type of thing to your relationship with God, John has pretty strong words for that, right? If we come in here and say, I don’t care about the person next to me, don’t care what they’re going through, it’s just me and God.

This is why we, you know, as a practice share our intentions with one another. We rejoice with those who rejoice, we weep with those who weep. We can’t do that if we don’t even know each other as a Christian community, right? We need a society that once again embraces the love of God and the love of neighbor as foundational.

The rejection of God leads to making man the arbiter of his own actions regardless of what it may mean for our neighbor. And what that leads to is utter chaos if everybody is the arbiter of their own morality and their own actions. And so we are seeing what a total disregard for God’s commandments is doing, for example, to France.

Consider, I mean if you’ve been following the news, right? Consider the eldest daughter of the church, but whose people have rejected its Catholic roots for generations now. The nations of the West who share those Christian roots have by and large done the same. And while America as a nation under God has not succumbed to the same degree, the same dangers may very well befall us if we don’t recognize how such threats are right under our noses.

And so one of those threats that has recently come into vogue but is wholly incompatible with Christianity is socialism, right? It’s violation of subsidiarity, it’s the state usurping the individual’s rights, it’s just a whole list of things, right? That’s a whole other homily. I’m not gonna go into it now. So, but as a concrete expression of love of God and love of neighbor, I urge you to make sure you participate in the electoral process if you haven’t already done so, right? The choices may not be ideal.

Guess what? They never are. But choose the candidates that will foster the freedom necessary to live out the love of God and the love of neighbor, to freely do so. Those are the hallmarks of a just and free society.

And in conclusion, to end on a positive note, know the real enemy. As Father John Ricardo reminds us, the real enemy is not the person that belongs to the other party, or the other race, or the opposite gender. The real enemy is the one who foments all of this hatred and division among the humanity that God so loves.

And that’s why we pray the prayer of Saint Michael the Archangel after each and every Mass. Knowing the real enemy. God bless you.