Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1st reading: Deuteronomy 6,2-6

Psalm: 17 (18),2-3,4,47.51ab

2rd reading: Hebrews 7,23-28

Gospel: Mark 12,28b-34

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Here we touch the heart of human life: we are born of love. We are each a fruit of God's love... every human being, from conception. And we are in the image and likeness of God, made to love: the goal of human life is to love; it is not to be happy, it is not to be free. Freedom is the condition of possibility of love; joy and happiness are the consequences of love. But he who wants to jealously guard his freedom finds himself centered on himself and incapable of loving; and he who is in search of happiness finds himself in a symmetrical, but almost identical, situation where it is his own person who is at the center. Only love can decenter us and make us know the joy of the gift of ourselves.

The two great commandments that we have heard in this Gospel both come from the Torah, from the Law. The first one we heard in the first reading and in the book of Deuteronomy at the beginning of chapter 6: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, for there is one Lord.” You may know that this is what is written on small scrolls that our Jewish brothers fix on the doorpost of the house or that during prayer, they carry on their foreheads or on their hands. The second commandment: "You will love your neighbor as yourself" comes from the Book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18. What is new in this Gospel since these two commandments are already there and since in a whole part of the Jewish tradition, other rabbis say the same thing as Jesus? What is new? What is new is Jesus. What is new is that in this man, Jesus of Nazareth, these two commandments are perfectly joined. And in his Encyclical on the Sacred Heart that the Pope has just offered us, he shows precisely how this heart of Jesus is this heart that loves both divinely and humanly. In Jesus these two commandments are perfectly united. And so Jesus becomes a model for us since he gives us part in his Holy Spirit who, the apostle Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans (5,5), pour out the charity of God into our hearts. We are made to love.

The first question I ask myself and I ask ourselves is: do I really love God? How does this love that I have or that I claim to have for God, how does this love manifest itself in my life? Do I tell Him in my prayer: “My God, I love you”? Do I ask Him to grow this love: “Give me love, teach me to love you more”. But since God is not easy to love, no one has ever seen Him. Also, we know, the only Son who is turned toward the bosom of the Father, has made him known to us : Who sees me, Jesus said to Philip, sees the Father (Jn 14,8:XNUMX). In order for us to progress in this love of God, God reveals himself in Jesus in a very mysterious way. And it is then a question of contemplating Jesus… Saint Teresa of Avila insists a lot on the humanity of Jesus as the place where the mystery of God is revealed to us. Do I love Jesus? How is this love for Jesus manifested?

We know that Saint Therese is a lover of Jesus: Loving Jesus and making him loved regularly comes up under her pen. In her “complete conversion” she wrote, when she was about to be 14 years old, at the house in Les Buissonnets, on Christmas Eve 1886, Therese said: charity has entered my heart. And with this charity, the desire to save souls, that is, to cooperate with Jesus for the salvation of sinners.

Almost nine years later, on June 9, 1895, Thérèse would have this intuition on the feast of the Holy Trinity to offer herself to the merciful Love of God, to offer herself as a “Victim of the Holocaust,” she said, to merciful Love. Rereading this event, she said how her heart had expanded again in the love of God. A little over a year later, on September 8, 1896, she let flow forth in what is now called Manuscript B, this great loving prayer to Jesus where she discovered her vocation! She returned to Carmel on April 9, 1888, and it was on September 8, 1896, eight years later, that she said:

My vocation, finally, I have found it… in the Heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love.

(Ms B 03v)

9 months later, in June 1897, three months before her death, she wrote this in Manuscript C:

This year, my dear Mother, the good Lord made me understand what charity is; before I understood it, it is true, but in an imperfect way, I had not explored these words of Jesus in depth: "The second commandment is like the first: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." I applied myself above all to loving God and it is in loving Him that I understood that my love should not be expressed only by words, because: « Not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but everyone who does the will of God. ”[…]

It is extraordinary to see the path that leads Thérèse to say: this year, God has made me understand what charity is! I emphasize this so that we may each be encouraged: perhaps we have not yet discovered everything and God has not yet made us perceive everything…

A little further on, Thérèse continues:

[Jesus] said: Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Beloved Mother, in meditating on these words of Jesus, I understood how imperfect my love for my sisters was, I saw that I did not love them as the Good Lord loves them. Ah! I understand now that perfect charity consists in bearing the faults of others, in not being surprised by their weaknesses, in being edified by the smallest acts of virtue that we see them practicing. […]

This love for God, and this love for our neighbor, are expressed in a very simple and ordinary way in the ordinary of human relationships. Love for God grows in particular in silent prayer, when I choose to remain there in silence before... nothing, but in faith, in this certainty of the heart that God is indeed present, even before I make myself present to his presence and ask the Holy Spirit to make this love for God grow in my heart. Love for our neighbor is not first a great surge of the heart, love is put into the very concrete acts of daily life. I said, in Jesus, the accomplishment of these two loves is completely unified. It is with the same movement that Jesus loves his Father and offers himself to him, loves us and offers himself to us. In the same movement… So that his new commandment, which is the only new commandment of the Gospel — all the others, we can find them in the first Covenant — the only new commandment is: “Love one another as I have loved you.” We can say to ourselves: yes, but… God loves… but he is so great… Yes, but Jesus, he is in all things similar to us, with the exception of sin; therefore we can love like Jesus. And that is why we constantly reread the Gospels to see how Jesus loves. And that is why we seek to imitate Jesus, to do like him and that there is this good question that we can ask ourselves regularly: What would Jesus do in my place? By asking the Holy Spirit to help us find the right answer.

A little further on in this same manuscript C, Thérèse continues:

When Jesus gave his apostles a new commandment, HIS COMMANDMENT, as He says later, it is not to love one's neighbor as oneself that He speaks of, but to love him as He, Jesus, loved him, as He will love him until the end of time... Ah! Lord, I know that you command nothing impossible, you know better than I my weakness, my imperfection, you know well that I could never love my sisters as you love them, if you yourself, oh my Jesus, did not still love them in me. It is because you wanted to grant me this grace that you made a new commandment. — Oh! how I love it since it gives me the assurance that your will is to love in me all those you command me to love!... (Ms C 11v-12v)

Yes, Jesus, our high priest who fulfills this priesthood precisely by the unification of this double charity, Jesus who gives us a share in the Holy Spirit who rests upon him, makes us truly capable of loving in deed and in truth as he loved us.

It is first of all about letting ourselves be loved by him, as we are, letting this love flow through us to reach our neighbor.

Let us strongly desire to be able to pronounce on the day of our death, the same words with which Therese ended her life. Looking at her crucifix, she cried out in her last words which are inscribed in the mosaic at the back of the crypt:

Oh! I love it!………………….

My God… I love you…

CJ September 30, 97 – very last words

Amen

Father Emmanuel Schwab, Rector of the Shrine