Love of the Neighbour: Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; this Sunday, through the lectionary, Our Lord places before us the commandment of love for our neighbour. Building on this injunction, a commandment that we have an obligation to comply with, Holy Mother Church teaches us in the Catechism:

Even if it does not contradict the provisions of civil law, any form of unjustly taking and keeping the property of others is against the seventh commandment: thus, deliberate retention of goods lent or of objects lost; business fraud; paying unjust wages; forcing up prices by taking advantage of the ignorance or hardship of another. (CCC no. 2409)

These teachings help us to engage with a scenario that played out in the shadow of the venerable Sé of Goa some weeks ago. After playing football all day long with other members of the Cathedral parish, two blue-collared migrant men borrowed the bike of a friend, another migrant worker. Slightly inebriated these two men charged down the wrong side of a one-way street and rammed into the recently purchased vehicle of another parishioner, a local. Outraged, and because he had not purchased an insurance, the violated man, snatched the key of the scooter that the two errant men were on, and indicated that only after they coughed up a substantial sum - arbitrarily arrived at – to repair the damage to his new vehicle, would he return the key to them.

This scenario is an apt description of situations encountered in many parts of the world. As law and order breaks down – more so in Goa than any other part of the world, I imagine – one can understand the frustration of people, who can no longer rely on the state agents of law enforcement – in this case the police. And so, they take the law into their own hands.

But what does the morality of Our Lord teach us? Already, before His incarnation, he spoke of this through the words of the Prophet Isaiah which we hear in the first reading:

You shall not molest or oppress an alien

The (not only) trouble with the Goan parishioner’s action was that the bike, whose key he had illegally and illegitimately impounded, did not belong to these two men, but to a third person, who was now deprived of his property for no reason other than the fact that he had loaned his bike to his friends. As Our Lord says, through the prophet Isaiah:

If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. 
What else has he to sleep in?

There are pressures in the life of a migrant that those who have the privilege of not having to migrate, or the opportunity to live as expats, may never understand. It is for this reason that we must take care that we never molest or oppress the alien, whether through the law, or outside of it.

There is, however, a parallel obligation on the migrant: to follow the law, and to love the community that accepts them.

Speaking at the Autumn Plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference in September this year, Bishop Erik Varden had some veryilluminating words to deal with the complex scenario that accompanies the overwhelming wave of migration that has overtaken so many parts of the developed world – and it not unknown in in India either. Bishop Varden pointed out that as Christians “it is our duty to extend a helping hand to those in need, to open our doors to the homeless, to share our material wealth with the poor.” However, he went on to elaborate, the Catechism also teaches us that immigrants are:

obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens (CCC no. 2241).

Creatively drawing on the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict, he pointed out that:

St Benedict sets a radical standard. He decrees that all guests — who will chiefly be paupers and homeless folk — must be received as if they were Christ himself. As soon as they knock on the door, the porter is to exclaim ‘Deo gratias!’ and ask for their blessing. The abbot is to wash their hands and feet. Every kindness is to be shown them. The community must exert itself to meet their needs. Such is the law of Christian hospitality (RB 53, 66).  

But this is for guests; for those who wish to stay, St. Benedict’s approach is different. They are to be kept waiting for a while, and are to be read the rule, repeatedly, to not only indicate the norms of the community to which they wish to belong, but to internalise their importance. As Bishop Varden puts it:

to belong to a community is a trying, demanding business. It requires generosity and determination. It calls for a will to nurture fellowship of intent.

And so we have it; one has an obligation to love the alien, but one has also the obligation to respect the community one belongs to and to which one wishes to join.

The words from St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians offer us the ideal to which we are all – natives and aliens – are called to live:

in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything. 
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.

May Our Lord grant us the wisdom to discern the way of love.

(Image reference: Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples (detail), Nicolas Bertin, c. 1720 and 1730, Art Institute of Chicago.)

Come and Worship! Homily for the Twentynineth Sunday in Ordinary Time

repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God.

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, following from the words of Our Lord today, what is it that we owe to God? To answer this question, we could have recourse to the powerful words from the book of Revelation (4:11):

Worthy art thou, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for thou didst create all things,
and by thy will they existed and were created.

In other words, God is owed our worship, and if we refer to the first of the commandments, contained also in our first reading from the prophet Isaiah,

I am the LORD and there is no other,
there is no God besides me,

we recognize that this worship is due to Him alone and to no one else. To offer to anyone, or anything, else the worship – in Latin latria – that is due to God, is to commit idolatry (from the Greek eidolon-latreia), a very serious and grave offence indeed. And so, we cannot, and may not, offer to Caesar – i.e. the powers and principalities of this world – what is due to God alone.

The primacy of the commandment to love God first is not some idle commandment because God wishes to be adored. As the fourth common preface to the Eucharistic canon teaches us:

although you have no need of our praise,
yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift,
since our praises add nothing to your greatness
but profit us for salvation.

Man is a creature in need of God, and worship helps him to order his life, so that he may then be able to fulfill the second commandment: love thy neighbour. It is a truism, that one cannot love one’s neighbour appropriately, if one does not (appropriately) love God first.

And how is one to worship God appropriately? The words of the psalm this Sunday have something to teach us:

Worship the LORD, in holy attire;
tremble before him, all the earth;

To worship the Lord in holy attire must refer not only to the requirement that we must be appropriately dressed, this is, of course, essential, but – as we learned last Sunday – that our hearts must be vested in caritas, i.e. the attire of love. We cannot worship appropriately if our hearts are dark with anger and upset, lacking in trust in the Lord.

A few words also on the appropriateness of the dress that we wear to church. It has become commonplace, especially ever since the seventies, to suggest that the externals are unimportant, that what matters is our heart. As such, what we wear to church does not matter, it is how our heart beats that really matters.

This is all very well, except the false prophets of the seventies, and thereafter, forgot that we are not pure mind, but embodied beings, a blended unity of mind and body. Our body helps us shape our mind, our will and our soul. It is through the disciplining of our tangible bodies that we can discipline the intangible mind, will, and soul.

How we dress to church, therefore, matters. It matters HUGELY!

We can move on to understand the second line from the psalm:

tremble before him, all the earth

The behaviour of most people in church in our times is demonstrative that they do not realise that the church is not simply a meeting place, but the place where heaven and earth meet; not simply on the altar, but in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament present in the tabernacle. This tabernacle is not dissimilar to the Ark of the Covenant that the Israelites carried with them through their journey in the desert. The presence of God is not dissimilar to what Moses saw on Mount Sinai when he was told:

Take off the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground (Ex 3:5).

It was so that we appreciate this fact, and approach the Lord with fear and trembling, that the Catholic tradition has taught us to genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament when we enter the church, subsequently kneel in prayer as we compose ourselves for the sacrifice of the Mass, and then, if we wish to sit, remain in silence until the Mass begins.

A fellow priest recently pointed out the five sins that are committed when one talks unnecessarily in a church. The first is immodesty in relation to decorum, disregarding the solemn and holy atmosphere of the sanctuary, one lowers the respect due to the house of worship. The second sin is that of admiratio, attracting, or causing, undue attention to oneself, through the speech or noise, in the process distracting the community from focusing on God. The third sin is being incircumspect, disregarding and disrupting the prayerful focus of the worshippers. The fourth sin is of injustice, to God and others, depriving God of reverence, and our neighbors of quiet. In so doing, we breach the charity and respect, the caritas, owed to the body of believers. The fifth sin, is that of loquaciousness, indulging in unnecessary or idle chatter, replacing sacred silence with worldly conversation.

Five sins, before we have even begun the Mass! And no doubt, these sinful seeds will yield their worldy fruit while we are attending the holy sacrifice. Think, therefore, dear brothers and sisters, of how important confession before Mass is, or how important discernment of our behaviour, so that the web of the world is taken from us, so that we may be vested in holy attire and appropriately render to God the worship that we owe Him.

My dear brothers and sisters, man is not just homo sapiens, the wise or knowing man, but also homo adorans, the worshiping man. Indeed, one could say that one becomes sapiential, i.e. wise or knowing, after, and only after, worshipping appropriately. With these words, I make my own those of the Gospel acclamation:

Shine like lights in the world
as you hold on to the word of life.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at Aaji Care Assisted Living Centre, Old Goa on 18 October 2026.)

(Image reference: Moses and the Burning Bush, Raphael, circa 1519, Raphael Loggias of the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.)

Come Dressed for the Feast: Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry,
of living in abundance and of being in need. 
I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the theme for the lectionary this Sunday is of food. But not just any food! As always, through the lens of mundane and material things, we are directed towards a deeper appreciation of the spiritual and the immaterial. This is to say, through the figures of food, and hunger, we are directed towards an appreciation of the Eucharist, the food of our souls, the nature of the hunger that we should have for it, and the satisfaction once we have consumed it.

As the Apostle Paul teaches us in these words from his letter to the Philippians, there is a secret to being well fed and going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need; the recognition that:

                I can do all things in him who strengthens me

In other words, when we are strengthened by Our Lord, we are well fed and live in abundance. Indeed, so well fed and abounding in life are we; that we can bear all things hunger, all forms of privation because we know that Our Lord sustains us.

This does not mean that the pains of our unmet necessities, and the pangs of hunger go away. On the contrary, we continue to suffer them, much as Our Lord, who did not have to suffer, agonized over His wounds in the course of His Passion and while on the Cross. But like Him, when we live in faith and trust, when we are strengthened by communion with Him, we know that we can bear all things.

This lesson first comes to us today, through the words of the prophet Isaiah:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts
will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wines

We priests are taught that when we leave the sacristy and approach the altar, we must be conscious that we are ascending Calvary, where we will, in persona Christi offer up the sacrifice that was offered on that mountain. A sacrifice that will become for us all a feast of rich food and choice wine.

Too often, there is a misunderstanding about the meaning and the nature of the Mass. The Mass is the moment when we offer the perfect sacrifice to God. As in the days of the Old Covenant, when “calves and fattened cattle” were offered to God, so too today, we offer the Most Precious Body and Blood of His Son, so that:

                I can do all things in him who strengthens me

But this privilege, of being able to consume the Most Precious Body and Blood of God, does not come without its own rules, which the parable in the Gospel today educates us about.

'My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?'

No person may attend the wedding feast of the Lamb – the sacrifice of Calvary that we offer at every Mass – without being dressed in a wedding garment.

What is this wedding garment? The first, and most obvious answer, is baptism. In baptism, our souls, stained by original sin, are cleansed by being dipped into the blood of the Lamb, and returned to us shining white, so that we may participate in the life of grace.

When discussing the parable we hear this Sunday, the Church Fathers are also clear that while baptism is an obvious answer to the question of the meaning of the wedding garment, this response is not sufficient. The wedding garment is love, caritas. Our hearts must be vested in this unstained garment of love if we are to participate in the wedding feast.  And this vestment refers as much to our actions, loving God and loving our neighbour, as to the cleansing of this heart if it has been despoiled. In other words, if our actions have been sinful, the garment over our hearts is not the wedding garment, but indeed the web of the world. Listen, once again, to the words of the Prophet:

On this mountain he will destroy
the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations;
he will destroy death forever.

Through His sorrowful and glorious Passion on mount Calvary, He destroyed the web of deceit spun by the Prince of Evil. Through the Most Precious Blood and Water that flowed from His side, He birthed the Church and offered to us the sacraments that can keep us free from being enveloped in sin once again.

The opportunity to come in the wedding garment is a simple one. Come with a heart that has charity restored in it through the sacrament of reconciliation. As simple as that. For those who would not, your reward has already been notified to you:

the king said to his attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet,
and cast him into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’

In conclusion I offer you the same benediction as our father St. Paul:

My God will fully supply whatever you need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
To our God and Father, glory forever and ever. Amen.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful gathered in the Pastoral Institute, Old Goa for the course in the Catechism of the Catholic Church on 11 October 2026.)

(Image reference: ‘Not Having a Wedding Garment,’ Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Peter & St. Paul, Washington D.C., photographed by Fr. Lawrence Lew, OP.)