A Homily for the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6 Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 12:28b-34
Boundaries are curious things. We speak of them as though they were absolute. But we can only recognize a boundary because we have some sense that there is another side. We do not speak of the world or the universe as being bounded. No, to recognize a boundary is already to have seen beyond it.
That is the point of this passage from Anne Michael’s mesmerizing and rather mystical novel Held (2024). Science is supposed to draw lines, to define objects and categories. Human life, however, cannot be contained by systems and limits. Certainly not those qualities that make us uniquely human. You can speak of rational boundaries, but when you do, you are not speaking of human life.
When we are moved, Paavo thought, when we feel something beyond us, it is the boundary, the limit of the body that allows us to recognize it. Limit is proof of the beyond. Not the self, but what lies beyond the self. He would not be surprised if physics made sense of it someday; but only because science is bent on proving it doesn’t exist. Scientists will rip us to shreds looking for it, but it will not be found where they are looking. He remembered a joke, about someone who’d lost something and was searching across the street, under a streetlamp. Why are you looking for it there? Because the light is better.
Now he thought perhaps it was not a joke after all. Don’t look for something where you’ve lost it, you’ll never find it there. Look where the light is.
We need to perceive, he thought, according to the scale that matter insists upon. There is the body and everything that is not the body, but at the highest magnification we are one system; how else could sound waves dismantle us, free us, bind us?
It is equally hard to summarize the Gospel, to explicate its boundaries. It should be. The Gospel is a proclamation. It summons us to a new way of life, a way Jesus himself lived. It is even harder to translate the Gospel into a set of commandments. How does one legislate a way of life?
Yet when our Lord was asked to summarize his new way of life, he did so, which is why we owe particular attention to his response. When a scribe asks about commandments,
Jesus replied, “The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:29-31).
Jesus speaks of love of neighbor as a great commandment. To live as he did is to open your heart and your arms to others, to reverence them as vessels from which the only life you have ever known flows.
We speak of individuals. We define ourselves as such, but there has never been a moment where an “I” has existed without a “you.” Truth is, completion for each of us lies in the other. Was that not the point of the Genesis creation story? Adam can name, categorize, set boundaries between one animal and another, but he cannot find completion without Eve, the one who is already a part of him, his path to completion.
All our interactions with others split into two streams: We ignore, or we acknowledge. If we begin by ignoring others, we will end up abusing them, but to acknowledge others is to reverence their humanity.
Nonetheless, love of neighbor is the second commandment. Jesus presents it as resting upon one even more fundamental, love of God.
To speak of God is again to speak of boundaries. Because whatever God is, God is not us. God is beyond the boundary. Indeed, the very notion of God is an acknowledgment of our own limitations. We are not all there is. How sad life would be if we were!
No, something—someone!—lies beyond us. If an unbeliever were to chide us for our confidence in what we cannot see, how should we respond except to acknowledge that we chafe at a bound human life? We rightly sense that life is unlimited, ordered outside itself. Remember that to set a boundary is already to have surpassed it.
The word “religion” comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind.” Prayer, fasting, all acts of asceticism: We call these religious acts not because they grasp or contain God but because they bind, they rein in the self. Acts that we call religious, when they are purified of magic and superstition, are acknowledgments that we are bounded.
Modern people find it increasingly hard to pray because we tell ourselves that the world revolves around us. To pray is to press one’s face against the window, yearning for it to open beyond and outside the self.
Jesus binds love of God to love of neighbor because there is no way to love a God, whom we cannot directly see, except to love those whom we do see. Thus, love of God shows itself in two ways. We pour ourselves out in love of others while we constantly seek to rein in our concept of self, our self-imposed isolation.
We are not heroes when we love God and others in acts of service. We are simply choosing life, a life that contains but does not limit us.
