May Jesus Christ be
praised and may his holy Mother pray for us.
The greatest joy in my
life as a priest is the celebration of the Holy Mass. In every celebration of the Eucharist the
priest and the holy people of God enter into a sacred dialogue. I offer to you an invitation and with faith
and love you respond in the words that belong to you as a baptized child of
God. At the beginning of the Eucharistic
Prayer, I invite you to “Lift up your hearts,” and you respond, “We lift them
up to the Lord.” We say these sacred
words so very quickly and so often that we can miss the invitation of the Lord. The Lord Jesus invites us to offer our hearts
to him. The Lord Jesus invites us to
unite our hearts to his Sacred Heart to the praise and glory of God our
Father. Today in our reading from the
Gospel, the Lord Jesus desires our hearts.
In nearly every passage
in the sacred scriptures, we learn something about ourselves or we learn
something about what the Lord God has called us to do. In our first reading today, we learn about
the freedom that God has given to us and the freedom that he sustains in us. Each of us was created in love and each of us
was given the ability to choose between good and evil. It is true that because of original sin evil
and sin are appealing to us. We are
subject to temptation. The choice to
follow that temptation, however, remains our own. We have the ability to say “Yes” to the
invitation of God. We also have the
ability to say “No” to God. That is the
gift of freedom that the Lord has given to us.
The Lord will not take our hearts from us. He will only receive our hearts as a gift.
In our Gospel today we
hear from the Sermon on the Mount. The
Lord Jesus has gathered his disciples on the mountain and he is instructing
them in the ways of discipleship. He
teaches his disciples and he teaches us the greater meaning of the Law of
Moses. The law that Moses gave to the
people of Israel was concerned with correct actions. That is the focus of all law. The Lord Jesus invites us to something
greater. The Lord Jesus invites us not
only to love in our actions, but also to love in the motivation for our
actions. The Lord Jesus invites us to
purify our hearts. We hear today of the
danger of anger, lust, and deceitful speech.
These dangers are present in our hearts long before they are present in
our actions. The Lord Jesus invites us
to fight against them in our hearts so that our hearts may be a pure offering
to him.
Anger is deadly
poison. It slowly kills the one who
keeps it. Every day in our prayer and
every time we participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we have the
opportunity to turn toward the Lord and ask him to cleanse us of our
anger. We beg the Lord to take from us
the anger that we hold in our hearts from wounds that we received years ago,
and from wounds that we received yesterday.
We ask the Lord to purify our hearts of anger so that love may take its
place.
The danger of lust is
that is fails to recognize the dignity of another person. Very simply, lust makes another person into a
thing. When lust is allowed to reign in
the heart of a person, then every other person is viewed as a thing to be used,
rather than a mystery to be reverenced.
Lust is a corruption of the gift of God.
Lust takes what is holy and makes it profane. Lust takes what belongs to a sacrament, and
makes it into a sacrilege. We beg the
Lord to turn our eyes and our thoughts toward him and to grant us the grace to
love as he loved and to speak as he spoke.
Deceitful speech
destroys relationships. When we are not
truthful in our speech, and when our words and our promises have no meaning,
then we destroy our relationships with each other and with God. We beg the Lord to purify our hearts and our
lips so that we might speak the truth in love.
As we celebrate this
Eucharist today, let us ask the Lord for the grace to use the gift of freedom
well. May the power of his love and the
sacrifice that we offer cleanse our hearts of anger, lust, and dishonesty. And when the invitation is given to “Lift up
your hearts,” may we respond with the gift of our whole heart and proclaim, “We
lift them up to the Lord.” Amen.
Preached
at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, Monroe, NC
