Do what is written in your hearts!

Homily
15th Sunday in ordinary Time
11 July 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

If Jesus Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain. If Jesus Christ is not risen, we Christians are the most pitiable people of all. St. Paul speaks to us bluntly, if ever we are attempted to think of Jesus as simply another great hero or teacher in human history. If we think of Jesus only in this way, Paul says we are stupid, and pitiable, and wasting our time. In today's letter to the Colossians, Paul gives an exalted theology of Jesus, defining Him as the origin and completion of all that ever was, or is or will be. Jesus is not just another teacher or hero. Paul says either He is everything or He is nothing.
Not that Jesus wasn't a great moral teacher as well. He teaches us so much about how to know and love and choose the good, and how to recognize, and hate, and avoid what is evil. If not the only great moral teacher, Jesus Christ is as good as any, and especially His parables like the Good Samaritan expose in a beautiful way if we are not living the best life we could live. If not the only great moral teacher in history, Jesus is especially good at rending our hearts wide open.
Yet Paul would remind us that we are not disciples of Jesus because we think we can prove He is the greatest moral teacher there ever was or ever will be. In fact, there are many who do not believe in Jesus precisely because they think His moral teaching can be found just as readily in something or someone else. There are many who do not follow Jesus because they find His disciples to be the most immoral of people. So we must remember that Jesus Himself did not ask us to follow Him because He alone knew how to teach us how to be good, nor does He say that anyone who does not follow Him is evil. No, Jesus says things that correspond to what Paul is trying to say to us. Jesus says things that confirm Paul's high theology of Jesus being the one through whom and for whom all things were made. Jesus proclaims Himself not to be the single greatest moral teacher of all time, but proclaims Himself to be the way, the truth and the life. He says that no one comes to the Father except through Him.
Regarding morality, Jesus might certainly agree with Moses, who in giving the decalogue received from God to the Israelites, tells them that the divine moral commands are not a new magic formula from heaven, but are to be a constant reminder of what is already written in their mouths and in their hearts. God has written his moral law to do good and to avoid evil in the very nature of the human person, so whenever Jesus or Moses or any other valid prophet speaks the divine law, it is not a law that imposes itself on the human person from the outside. We don't listen to God because we have to or else. We listen to God because He is helping to reveal us to ourselves. The divine law spoken well does not constrain an originally bad person from doing bad, it frees an originally good person to be good, and to know, and love and choose the good with all his heart and mind and strength. That the divine law is a law God has already written in the human heart, means that anyone who knows the natural law of man, anyone who can recognize what is true, good, beautiful and eternal, whether or not he possesses faith, can speak with Jesus and like Jesus about the moral law. Jesus never said that His voice was the only moral voice, or that His teaching could not be echoed and promoted and fruitfully elaborated on by many, even those who do not believe in Him. That is why there are and will always be and should be many good people who are not Christians.
Paul reminds us not to be Christians only because it is one of many paths to being good. He tells us to be Christians because Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead. He has revealed Himself as the One without which there is nothing. But of course we believe in Jesus not simply because we are afraid of Him and His judgements. No, quite the opposite, we believe in Jesus because in today's parable of the Good Samaritan, we are not the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, or the innkeeper. We are not the scholar of the law seeking to justify himself by seeking a better definition of who is one's neighbor. No, in today's Gospel, we are the man in the ditch. We are Christians because Jesus continues to come to us when we are lost and naked, when we do not not how to live, and Jesus is the one who shows the greatest mercy to us. We are Christians because Jesus is the one who never tires of helping us. He is the one who forgives us, who pours oil and wine over our wounds, who bandages us, who carries us, and who redeems us by paying the price of redemption for us, as many times as we need redeemed. We are Christians because by the wounds of Christ we have been healed, and we have been washed clean by the blood of the innocent Lamb. We are Christians because Christianity is not a philosophy or a morality proposed to us from the outside, it is a relationship with a person who has healed us and set us free from the inside. We are Christians because anyone who has experienced the true love of God brought down from heaven, and delivered in the most intimate and perfect way by Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, no longer has need of the question - who is my neighbor?