Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 36 of Season 6 for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary time: Oct. 29, 2023. Our Gospel reading is from Matthew, Chapter 22, verses 34-40.
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
The Gospel of the Lord.
“God’s Favorite,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut
There is something in our human nature that compels us to want to be someone's favorite. Whether it be a teacher in school, a coach, a boss, a father, a mother, our siblings, we desire to be seen and recognized as someone's favorite. That someone looks at us and recognizes our special uniqueness, our talents, our giftedness, and sees them almost as more important as someone else's, to be seen in this special, more endearing light. And so I'm sure all of us, at one point or another, have found ourselves wrestling with this need to be someone's favorite.
If we struggle with this on a human level, we must also struggle with it on a divine level. I think there is also within us this desire to be seen as one of God's favorites, to have God shower His mercy and His graces upon me, either because of what I do or simply because of who I am or what my particular need might be at that moment, we desire to be God's favorites. And we look out at the expanse of the Divine Majesty of how God has created all of the heavens and the earth, the vastness of the universe. We're encountering another change of seasons, and we can marvel at the beauty of that change, of how the cycle continues once again, over and over, and we realize that God is the author and the creator of all of this that's before us, even that small blade of grass that I walked on this morning. And then we look at ourselves, and we wonder, "How can God, in the midst of all of this greatness, see me as one of his favorites? How can that be?" And we tend to look at what we don't do right versus what we do, and we get caught up in our weakness, in our sinfulness, in our conflicted lives, in our poor decisions, in our self-concepts, and the list goes on and on, to convince us of why we shouldn't be God's favorite. There are people better than I who deserve that. That's reserved for the St. Francis of Assisis of the world, or the Mother Teresas of Calcutta of the world, or the Dorothy Days of the world. Those are God's favorites. I am not in league with them. And so, the idea of being one of God's favorites is cast aside.
When God creates, God invests himself. So think about this for a moment. If we ponder God in the vastness of the universe, it's very easy for God to become very impersonal. We can almost begin to talk about God as if he were simply an energy. or some force, a life force, or some power, or something other than a personal, intimate God. And so God can get lost in the vastness of things. But if we bring it closer to home, we begin to touch a God who's not so impersonal. That really is quite personal indeed.
Consider this: when God created you as the person you know yourself to be, He didn't just randomly do that. He didn't leave it to an assembly line of angels to figure out how to put you together because he had other agendas on his mind. God, in all of his power and all of his love and all of his presence, chose to delight in the creation of who you are. It was a work of art in a moment of time where he assembled the pieces of your soul together as you are as a person, with intent, on purpose, and in love. He didn't just create you. He delighted in you. He fashioned you. He made you the one-of-a-kind, only creation that you are. And you cannot be replaced. I cannot be replaced. No human being can be replaced because we're all uniquely fashioned in the image of God himself.
And so we look to the essence of our soul for this spark of divine love, for this presence of God's love, for this specialness that God has given to me and only to me. It is there that I now have a very personal and close and loving and intimate relationship with this God, who also created everything around me, but at that moment in time left himself within me as well, and that divine love exists at the core of who I am, and I can love myself because of the gift of who I am. I can love myself because God loves me
And so, once we begin to see this essence of love within our soul, we begin to realize this amazing fact: every one of us is God's favorite. Each one of us has a claim with God, and He has a claim on us, unlike anyone else. Each one of us is endowed with that favored blessing. Each one of us is a special and unique gift. All of our brothers and sisters. And the essence of that love binds us together as one human family, but it also binds us together with our Creator. In this intimate, intimate bond of a loving relationship.
That's why once we begin to take this inner journey and look within and see the fire of this divine love and begin to understand and know and fall in love with God himself because God desires that we have a romance with him, that we unfold the uniqueness of this relationship, this intimate relationship, which is at the core of who we are.
Once we begin to touch that, then we realize how we're connected to this bigger web of the human family, and it becomes unthinkable, unbearable, to even consider doing harm to anyone else. It becomes unthinkable, unbearable, to even place ourselves above another human being or to see someone as being below us. It becomes unbearable and unthinkable to take up the sword. But yet, as we look throughout our world, that's exactly what we do.
You know, if we could take Christianity and put it in a bubble, the commandment to love God, to love neighbor as ourselves, would be an easier order to take up. But we can't live in a bubble, and bubbles aren't real. We live in this world that is messy. This world in which there's a lot of conflict. This world in which we hurt one another so badly. As we ponder this world, this world that can at one time be filled with such grace and blessing and at the same time be filled with such destruction and harm. How do we find our way through this very trepid place? How do we find ourselves to language that can help us begin to speak about what's happening around us? When we consider the harm that is being done in the Holy Land as we speak, how many innocent people are being robbed of their life? People who are being kidnapped, children, torn from families.
This is not the first time. It's happening in Ukraine. It happens in other parts of the world. We didn't learn after the Holocaust. We didn't learn after the genocide in Africa. We never seem to learn from these experiences of war that inflicting harm upon one another goes against God's design and the essence of our soul. It negates love, and we just keep doing this over and over again. And this harm pierces human hearts. It destroys the very essence of God within.
Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.