(Thirty-first Sunday of the Year
(B): This homily was given on November 4, 2012 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly,
R.I. by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Deuteronomy
6:4-9; Mark 12: 28b-34.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Thirty-first Sunday 2012]
We didn’t suffer any major damage
to our church and property during Hurricane Sandy.
Or so I thought.
Then, on Thursday, a man said to
me, “Gee, Fr. Ray, isn’t it good that the church steeple didn’t fall off during
the storm?”
I said, “What are you talking
about?”
He said, “Didn’t you notice—the
cross on top of the church steeple is crooked?
It’s bent backwards.”
And, sure enough, it is!
You don’t notice it from the
front of the building, but you can see it if you look at the steeple from the
side.
Rest assured, we will be working
to get it straightened out in the very near future. All of which brings to mind another question
related to today’s gospel reading:
Is your mezuzah crooked—like the cross on top of our church?
You probably don’t have any
mezuzahs in your home (although you might), but you certainly do have one in
your heart.
And so do I.
But it’s not enough to have a mezuzah. From a spiritual perspective, it’s very
important that your mezuzah be straight
and not crooked.
It’s okay to have a crooked
mezuzah in your house (if you do have one there), but not in your soul.
Are you confused yet?
Well, if you are, I will now do
my best to un-confuse you!
First of all, what’s a
mezuzah? (The word, by the way, is
spelled m-e-z-u-z-a-h.)
Ask your Jewish friends that
question, and they’ll be happy to tell you that a mezuzah is a small, thin,
tubular case (about the size of a container of lipstick). Some mezuzahs are made of wood; others are
made of metal or some other sturdy material.
Many of them are quite ornate, although they don’t have to be.
They’re hung on the doorposts of
Jewish homes—on the right side of the frame, near the top. There’s a special prayer of blessing that you
recite when you first put a mezuzah up.
But what’s most important is
what’s on the inside of it. There you
will find, written on a tiny scroll of parchment, the words of what the Jews
call, “the Shema.” (Shema in Hebrew is
the command to hear.) The Shema consists of the verses we heard at
the end of today’s first reading from Deuteronomy 6 (along with a few others): “Hear,
O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord
alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God,
with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.
Take to heart these words which I command you today. Keep repeating
them to your children. Recite them when you are at home and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them on your arm as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your
forehead. Write them on
the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.”
Obviously the Jews take that last line literally,
which is why they put mezuzahs on the doorposts of their homes. When I was in Israel in the late 1990s, I
remember seeing them all over the place—even in the hotels.
And the Jews don’t just put them up and leave
them there for ornamentation. When
devout Jews pass through a door with a mezuzah on it, they touch the mezuzah,
and then kiss the fingers that touched it—to express their love for God and to
remind themselves of the commandment of God that’s inside: the command to love
him with their whole heart and soul and mind and strength.
It’s a very nice—and a very meaningful—religious
practice.
Now I always wondered why these mezuzahs were
hung crooked—at an angle—and not straight.
That puzzled me. And so I went to
a couple of Jewish websites last week and did a little research on the
matter. And what I came across on one of
them was this line: “Why is the mezuzah affixed at an angle? [It’s because] the rabbis could not decide
whether it should be placed horizontally or vertically, so they compromised!”
Mezuzahs are crooked because of a compromise.
To me, that fact has great spiritual
significance.
I said at the beginning of my homily that,
although we might not have any mezuzahs in our homes, each of us does have one
in our heart. As Jesus reminds us in
today’s gospel, the command to love God with all our heart and soul and mind
and strength is still valid! It hasn’t
changed. It applies to us as much as it
has applied to the Israelites since the time of Moses. It is—and always will be—the first and the
greatest commandment.
Which means that it’s always supposed to be in
our heart—in our “spiritual mezuzah,” so to speak.
And as Christians we’re supposed to have a second
commandment in there as well: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
These two commandments, in other words, are
supposed to be at the foundation of our life of faith. They’re supposed to guide us in every thought and word and action of
our lives.
They’re supposed to guide us at home, at work, in
school—and even when we vote this coming Tuesday!
In fact, that should be the bottom-line question
for every Christian who goes to the polls on Election Day: Which candidates respect the law of God and the dignity of the human
person the most?
Love of God; love of neighbor.
Of course, the sad reality is that we don’t allow these two commandments to
guide us all the time. Because we’re sinners, we all compromise our beliefs in various ways
(like those rabbis compromised their beliefs), and our spiritual mezuzahs end
up ‘crooked’—just like those mezuzahs on the doors of Jewish homes are crooked.
That’s why I said at the beginning of my homily that
it’s really important that we try to keep our spiritual mezuzahs straight, and,
when we don’t keep them straight and they do get crooked, we need to get them
straightened out as quickly as possible through repentance.
Which, of course, is precisely what
the sacrament of Confession is for.
So the next time you visit a
Jewish friend and see a mezuzah on his doorpost, think of yourself. Think of your
life. Remember the two commandments of
Jesus, to love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself. And, as you look at that crooked container, think of the many ways that you have failed to
live those commandments.
Then ask the Lord to straighten
you out!
And, of course, if you make a
good confession afterward—the good news is, he will!
