Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today’s Invitation
Today we invite you to explore the question of who is our neighbor in the United States, with the help of Dorothy Day and Paulo Freire; engage the Christian call for dismantling empire with the example of the Haitian Revolution and European and American empire; and embody revolutionary struggle with the help of Black Panther Huey Newton and the artwork of José Ignacio Fletes Cruz.
Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time
Reading 1
Moses said to the people: “If you, and your children, and their children revere YHWH, your God, all the days of your
life, and if you keep the laws and commandments that I lay before you, you will have a long life. Listen then, Israel, and observe carefully what will bring you prosperity and will increase your numbers greatly, as YHWH, the God of your ancestors has promised you, giving you a land that flows with milk and honey.
“Hear, O Israel: YHWH, our God, YHWH is One.
You are to love YHWH, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your strength.
Let these words that I command you today
be written in your heart.”
Responsorial Psalm
Response: I love You, O God, my strength.
I love You, O God, my strength. / You are my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer.
R: I love You, O God, my strength.
My God, my rock in whom I take refuge,
My shield, and the horn of my salvation, / my stronghold.
I call upon You, who are worthy to be praised, / and I am saved from my enemies.
R: I love You, O God, my strength.
Our God lives, and blessed be my rock, / and exalted be the God of my salvation.
Great triumph You give to Your leader, / and show steadfast love to Your anointed.
R: I love You, O God, my strength.
Reading 2
There were so many priests in the old Covenant because death prevented them from continuing their work. But Christ lives on forever, and Christ’s work as priest does not pass on to someone else. And so Christ is able, now and always, to save those who come to God through Christ, because Christ lives forever to plead to God for them. God ordained that we should have such a high priest — one who is holy, who has no fault or sin, who has been set apart from sinners and raised above the heavens. Jesus is not like other high priests and does not need to offer sacrifices every day, first for personal sins and then for the sins of the people. Christ’s self-sacrifice was offered once and for all. For the Law appoints as high priests people who are weak; but God’s sworn promise, which came later than the Law, appoints the Only Begotten, who has been made perfect forever.
Gospel
One of the religious scholars who had listened to them debating and had observed how well Jesus had answered them, now
came up and put a question to him: “Which is the foremost of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “This is the foremost: ‘Hear, O Israel, God, YHWH, is one. You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
The scholar said to Jesus, “Well spoken, Teacher! What you have said is true: the Most High is one and there is no other. To love God with all your heart, with all your understanding and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself — this is far more important than any burnt offering or sacrifice.” Jesus, seeing how wisely this scholar had spoken, said, “You are not far from the kindom of God.” And after that no one dared to question Jesus any more.
The Inclusive Lectionary © 2022 FutureChurch. All rights reserved.
The inclusive language psalms:
Leach, Maureen, O.S.F. and Schreck, Nancy, O.S.F., Psalms Anew: A Non-sexist Edition
(Dubuque, IA: The Sisters of St. Francis, 1984).
Used with permission.
Explore
Who are our neighbors?
As Christians, we hear Jesus’s injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves so much it can lose meaning. It’s something we say to ourselves when we give a dollar to a beggar or donate to charity. But what does it mean? Who is my neighbor and what does it mean to love them? What does it mean to say this in such an unequal country where the wealthy sleep in luxury while their neighbors sleep on the streets? If we want this most important commandment to have any meaning in our lives, we need to be clear about what we are called to do.
Who is my neighbor?
Throughout the history of the United States, the rights we claim to champion have usually been given meaning by contrast with those who are excluded. Only those meeting certain conditions can be viewed as neighbors, and the American’s greatest fear is to fall into the class of the excluded, the neighborless, because they know very well what this condition entails. Thus, much of American history has been characterized by negotiating and renegotiating the barriers to be considered a neighbor. Even today, we find nominal Christians attempting to exclude those they dislike from basic humanity.
However, Christ’s definition of neighbor knows no conditions. The exact same two commands to love God and neighbor are repeated in the Gospel of Luke and, appropriately, followed immediately by the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is how Jesus defines neighbor for us. That it is a Samaritan, the traditional enemy of the ancient Israelites, that stops to help the injured man, shows that everyone is our neighbor – even those from rival groups or those we find unpleasant. In the United States where nativist sentiment has reigned for generations, Christian commitment to loving our neighbor is being put to the test, and we are failing. While many refugees flock to this country out of desperation, supposed Christians traffic in race-baiting and xenophobia, spreading vile slander meant to incite violence against the downtrodden. While these people disgrace the Christ they claim to profess, those who authentically want to follow Jesus must open their hearts not only to the oppressed but to their struggle as well.
How do we love our neighbor?
Dorothy Day once wrote, “We continue in…feeding our brother and clothing him and sheltering him and the more we do it the more we realize that the most important thing is to love” (The Catholic Worker, “Love is the Measure,” 1946). Dorothy and those carrying on the tradition of the Catholic Worker have always realized the importance of meeting the immediate needs of the suffering. However, Dorothy also realized this charitable giving did not fully constitute solidarity with the oppressed. This required taking on their condition and joining in their concrete struggle. As she wrote, “What we would like to do is change the world – make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do” (“Love is the Measure”). It isn’t enough to help people survive with a boot on their neck, but we must join with them in removing the boot from their neck. This is why direct political action has always been a central part of the Catholic Worker. Without seeking to change the root cause of oppression, we easily fall into what popular education practitioner Paulo Freire referred to as “false generosity;” charity that refuses to interrogate the social causes of suffering is not solidarity but guilt amelioration.
While oppressors may fling change to a beggar, they dare not challenge the systemic injustices that provide them with positions of privilege. While this may make oppressors feel better, it does nothing to lessen the number of prostrate people with hands outstretched for aid and ensures there will always be a ready supply of impersonal, empty receptacles to receive the feigned generosity of the wealthy. As Freire put it, “An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity,’ which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 44).
As Dorothy understood, true solidarity with the oppressed means taking on their condition including their persecution. This has been exemplified in the U.S. by the Sanctuary Movement, which has its origins in the response of churches to the influx of refugees from El Salvador during that country’s civil war. Churches began asserting their ancient right of sanctuary to protect refugees from deportation back to countries with murderous, repressive governments who were usually backed by the U.S. and multinational corporations. El Salvador, for example, was subjected to a string of military governments as well as paramilitary death squads. These latter groups were infamously responsible for the assassination of San Salvador’s archbishop St. Oscar Romero. Here we can see a perfect example of taking on the condition of the oppressed by forcing us to confront the same persecution they face. This may bring us into conflict with the law, but as John Brown put it, “I went against the laws of men, it is true, but ‘whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye’” (Letter to Reverend Mcfarlan, November 23, 1859).
Commentary by Alex Zambito
Engage Catholic Social Teaching
In addition to this, in today’s iteration of anti-immigrant hysteria, it is not enough for Christians to offer assistance to those coming to the U.S. but to interrogate why they are forced to come here in the first place. The romantic notion that people simply flock to the U.S. for freedom and opportunity is mythology exemplified by the recent demagoguery against Haitian immigrants. Haiti did not reach its current crisis by some law of nature, but from the legacy of colonialism and exploitation. Haiti’s original sin for which it can never be forgiven was its 1804 revolution, which threw off French colonial domination. This example of the enslaved population of the world’s most lucrative colony asserting independence could not be allowed to stand, which is why European empires and the United States sought to punish Haiti throughout the 19th century and 20th centuries. Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, worked throughout his presidency to isolate the young state which had broken the chains of slavery. In 1825 French king Charles X ordered a fleet of warships to Haiti to extort an indemnity of 125 million Francs (between 20 to 30 billion in today’s dollars) from Haitians to pay for the privilege of freeing themselves. It would take Haitians over 120 years to pay off this odious debt, and by that time they had already been invaded by the United States.
The U.S. invaded the island nation in 1915 and would occupy it until 1934 with a puppet regime that cruelly crushed any resistance. By 1934, over 15,000 Haitians had been killed with the most notorious instance being the Cayes massacre where U.S. marines fired on a crowd of 1500, wounded 23 and killed 12. Along with this violence the U.S. also moved Haiti’s financial reserves to the U.S. and rewrote the Haitian constitution to give foreigners land-owning rights. Between the end of the U.S. occupation and the mid-1950s, Haiti was in a state of instability and violence with eight presidential elections and military coups. This lasted until 1957 when Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier was elected president and swiftly established himself as dictator. Papa Doc and his son and successor Jean-Claude would preside over a bloodthirsty regime until “Baby Doc” was forced to flee in 1987 by a popular uprising. The Duvalier regime was largely supported by the United States whose cold warriors deemed it a suitable alternative to the spread of communism in the region. Besides a brief period during the Kennedy administration, the U.S. provided the Duvaliers with millions of dollars every year all while the regime murdered an estimated 30,000 Haitians.
Haiti held its first post-Duvalier election in 1991, which brought the popular liberation theologian Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency. Aristide was soon overthrown by a military coup involving two officers who had been trained in the United States. While the U.S. would intervene and help restore Aristide to power in 1994, it would support a second coup to overthrow him for a second time a decade later. And all of this comes before the classic American skullduggery surrounding the 2008 earthquake, which we don’t have space for here.
I bring this up because essential to true Christian solidarity is the understanding that the United States is an empire, and if we truly want to help refugees we must also combat the thing that creates them – our own government and corporations. Jesus’s words here point us in that direction. Jesus places the importance of loving God and neighbor so closely for a reason. We must love our neighbor like we love God because, like us, they bear the image of God. Additionally, it is important that Jesus is quoting Moses after God had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, which demonstrates that God is for our liberation. By linking this with our neighbor, Jesus is showing us that our liberation is inherently intertwined with that of our neighbor. It gives meaning to what St. Paul says in his letter to the Hebrews, “Remember those who are in bonds as bound with them.” We cannot be free until we are all free. And in our case, it reveals that assisting refugees is not benevolent charity on our part but simply giving the oppressed what they are owed. As decolonial theorist Frantz Fanon put it,
“Colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories…The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth…Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples…So we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as ‘charity.’ Such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness – the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due, and the consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up” (Wretched of the Earth, 59).
A Contemplative Exercise
Poem
By having no family I have inherited the family of humanity.
By having no possessions I have possessed all.
By rejecting the love of one I have received the love of all.
By surrendering my life to the revolution I have found eternal life.
Revolutionary suicide.
-Huey Newton
A Witness
For me, Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, truly embodies this solidarity because he starts from the fundamental understanding that liberation comes from the oppressed. Freedom is not something that can be given from above but must be conquered from below. “False generosity” is ultimately disempowering for the oppressed because it removes their agency to act upon and transform their historical moment. Our goal must be consciousness raising among the masses to realize that the world can be a much more just place and they can make it so. This does not mean mechanically transferring knowledge like we have all the answers and bestow our enlightened ideas on the people. Freire understood this must be a creative process in dialogue with the oppressed who ultimately must be the protagonists in their own liberation. Like Jesus, it is about joining in their struggle on equal terms as humans with the same goal: the liberation of all humanity.
Art
Against a red sky, and surrounded by red earth and blue and green foliage, Jesus, wearing a white shirt and blue jeans is crucified on the cross with military soldiers in fatigues standing around. Other people stand a distance away.