Audacity of Love Sunday
Isaiah 50:5-9a; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35
When I walk down the streets of my neighborhoods, there’re enough beggars and homeless people loitering. One wonders what family means today, with so many human beings ending up on the streets. When I go to high school for Mass, I meet many sad children because their homes are broken by divorce and domestic violence. Divorce questions our notion of love beyond needing a sex partner or sex object as the definition of marriage. After Sunday Masses and all week long, I hear parents lamenting about their children and grandchildren who are addicted to all kinds of substance abuses. But what has parenting turned into if children and grandchildren cannot be disciplined and made to listen up!
These days, bad news is the order of the day – there are sexual predators all over the place; easy access to pornography, addictive substances, and guns; the production and promotion of disrespect of parents, teachers, and God himself, in the name of freedom. Rarely does one hear of heroes of Christianity – people who stand up to condemn divorces, those who establish alliances to take on labor exploitation of the poor; people who create barriers to sexual immorality and legalization of Marijuana and distribution of drugs. Our world is so mundane that it does not know that idolatry is the order of the day – people becoming slaves to their self-destructive passions!
Our readings today suggest that the audacity of love is the solution to our morally bankrupt world. Morality is a vision that says that the Creator-God has a moral order in place for his creatures; a moral order is the application and respect of God’s commandments; God’s moral order is the audacity of love!
Our first reading talks about the audacity of love in these words: “The Lord God opens my ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have not turned back.” This statement speaks to the irrevocability of one’s promises as the audacity of love. It calls for riding on the hightides of love, the point at which God takes precedence over our emotions – this is when we have abandoned “retreat and surrender” as options because of the love we have for God.
According to our first reading, this is the meaning of the audacity of love: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” The audacity of love is non-violence; it is vulnerability in the face of evil; it is the power that completely overrides the current world order that makes evildoers heroes of the world and champions of enslaving libertinism. We must not pay attention to them! But they will fight back by “beating us, plucking our beard and spitting in our face”, to rephrase our first reading.
The audacity of love is the ability to show off, without pretensions, one’s wounds, and scars of love: I gave that up because I wanted to save my marriage; I quit that, so that my children would have a better future; I engage in that in order that my neighbor would have access to that, etc. The litany of the audacity of love must be long enough and sufficiently widespread for it to impact the lives of our neighbors.
Our gospel reading confirms the audacity of love by making martyrdom its costliest price: “Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly.” In these words of Jesus and in the reality of his own life, we see the audacity of love – the love that accepted crucifixion like a criminal for standing up to narcissistic authorities of his day, and the system that oppressed the poor, exploited women and abused power.
The readiness to die without killing anyone in the process is the pinnacle of the audacity of love. This passes through the daily commitment to ensuring that God’s commandments become our constitution, and that freedom is not the substitute for lawlessness. The audacity of love is the defacing of exploitation masquerading as democracy when the haves guarantee that the have-nots do not ever have a shot at life. The audacity of love is to create a world where sacrificial love is extolled, and exploitation lacks buyers and patronage!
The high point of the audacity of love, when we have become lovers, is simple to notice; it is when we are able to say to our world order and its promises: “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Satan is everything that opposes the audacity of love; whatever militates against lifting a neighbor out of his/her own or systemic mess! It is not about judging others but saving the other, even when we think that the other does not deserve it; but God wants it for them, at our own expense, at the cost of our own audacity of love!
Only those whose lives demonstrate the audacity of love would understand our second reading and see in it a call to the audacity of love. James says: “I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.” Our “work” is the theatre of our audacity of love. Our “works” flag up our identity for or against the audacity of love. Be audacious, show off you good works, so to extinguish the evil works asphyxiating the poor and the need of our world today!
Assignment for the week:
Choose (a virtue) what you want to be known for doing and do it consistently this week.