22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, 2024

Published: September 1, 2024

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily on Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024.

Bishop Taylor

What is more important: truth or love? To be correct or to be kind? For something to be right or for something to be good? Actually this is a false question because neither truth nor love in the full sense of the term is really possible without the other and history is full of unloving attempts to do right and untruthful attempts to do good, which in fact are just damaging, deceiving distortions of truth and love.

1.) That truth can't exist without love can be seen in the case of the Inquisition. They knew no one comes to the Father but through Jesus and that we are obligated to convert others so they can be saved but they failed to see that truth separated from love is not even really truth because there is no truth apart from God and God's very nature is love. Therefore, their judgmental, merciless attempt to force people to accept the truth was of necessity self-defeating. It blinded both inquisitor and victim to the real truth of Jesus' Gospel of love and distorted, sabotaged the truth they thought they were promoting.

 2.) The reverse is also true. That love can't exist without truth can be seen in the case of the sexual revolution. Love may be the greatest of all the virtues but separated from truth (especially moral truth) is no longer even really love because there is no love apart from God and God's very nature is not only love, but also truth. Our complacent, non-critical acceptance of immoral behavior blinds us to the real truth about love and distorts, sabotages the more loving world we think we are promoting by avoiding the truth so as not to offend anyone.

In today's Gospel, Jesus addresses the connection between love and faithfulness to God. Scrupulous inquisitors criticize a minor violation of religious law on the part of Jesus' disciples. Religious law required handwashing before meals and these fault-finders felt it was their duty to bring others into compliance, but what they failed to see (as Jesus will soon point out) was that merely superficial religious observance is of no use. Why? Because love is the indispensable foundation of all true religious devotion and you can't legislate love; it has to come freely from within.

Religion motivated by anything other than love is distorted and sabotages the relationship with God we think our external compliance is promoting. For instance, when piety is motivated by fear and duty rather than by love, it tends to either max-out in the direction of fearful scrupulosity (which was the Pharisees' problem) or at the other extreme, to reduce itself to a kind of grudging minimalism, doing the least you think you can get away with and still make it to heaven (thinking God plays games or doesn't notice).

It was this kind of fearful, superficial, minimalistic, duty-bound, scrupulous, even superstitious lip-service that Jesus criticized when he quoted Isaiah in today's Gospel: "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine mere human precepts." What Jesus says here is that when worship is motivated by duty or fear or anything else other than love, it can actually lead us away from the one and only God of love rather than closer to him.

Elsewhere Jesus takes up the other side of this equation: the connection between truth and faithfulness to God. Since Jesus is the way, the truth and the life sent by the Father, any path chosen other than the way of truth leads us away from the one and only God of truth — who is the same as the one and only God of love.

Love and truth are inseparable in God, as they also are in us, whether we realize it or not. The longer we live a lie, the less love we have in our life ... and the more loveless we become, the more at risk we are for being deceived by some sort of truthless compensation, illusions that are really loveless lies.

We have a couple of concrete examples to say the same thing at the end of our second reading: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God ... is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction (selfless love) and to keep oneself unstained by the world (moral truth)." Love and truth are inseparable in God as they also are in us.