March 28, 2025 – Friday of the 3rd Week of Lent
Osée 14, 2-10 ; Marc 12, 28b-34
H O M I L Y
Let us listen carefully to Jesus' words when he is asked what is the first of all the commandments. He answers : "This is the first: 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! " What Jesus is saying is that the first and the greatest of all the commandments is to "hear", to "listen" to the Lord. This is also the first word of the Rule of Saint Benedict : "Listen…"
To listen is the same thing as to obey, and obedience is the most perfect form of love, since it is the love in which one does not expect anything is return. Obedience is love for the sake of love. "The Lord our God is Lord alone! Therefore – says Jesus -- you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength."
We are invited to love the Lord, not in order to receive something from Him, but simply because He has loved us first. And nobody in the Bible has spoken of God's love towards His people with such tenderness as the prophet Hoseah did. The first reading of this Mass, which was taken precisely from the book of Hoseah, is a call to conversion based on the awareness of the merciful love of God. Here again we find something parallel to this text in the first verses of the Rule of Benedict, where Benedict describes the monastic journey as a returning, through obedience, to the Lord from Whom we have departed through disobedience.
To those who will return to him Yahweh promises non only mercy but fullness of life and prosperity. He will love them and will be for them life dew from heaven, so that they will blossom like the lily, they will strike roots like the Lebanon cedar, and dwell in his shade. Those are not rewards for love, but pure gifts from our Father.
At the end of that beautiful text from Hoseah there is something both intriguing and beautiful, about the ways of the Lord. The paths of the Lord, says Hoseah, are straight. In the same paths the just walk and the sinners stumble. The path that the Lords lay before us is always the same. Whether we walk in it or we stumble depends on us. Let us all asks for the grace always to walk straight in the path of the Lord.