7th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 (St. Dominic Catholic Church)

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

St. Dominic Catholic Church
Los Angeles, California
February 20, 2022

My brothers and sisters in Christ,¹

As I was saying, it is a joy to be with all of you today for this celebration, and it’s great that we can do it in person! And actually we are celebrating the 101 anniversary because we couldn’t do it last year given the fact of coronavirus pandemic, so it is great that we are in person.

And we all are praying for the end of the pandemic. Hopefully this is a sign that we are moving ahead so let’s keep praying for that.

So on this great anniversary, we thank God for all his many blessings and graces during these past hundred years. We especially thank the Dominican order and all the pastors and priests. We also thank the religious sisters — the Dominican sisters and the sisters of Notre Dame. And all the ministers and volunteers and all the many families down through the years that have made this parish a source of light and peace, life and love.

And today we especially invoke your patron, the great St. Dominic, and we ask his intercession that we might be holy apostles as he was, and to work to protect our Catholic faith, and to share our love for Jesus Christ with all our hearts.

So it is a day of thanksgiving and joy, and also a day to start thinking of the next 100 years. So that’s your job.

So as we turn to our Gospel today, that beautiful passage of the Gospel that we just heard this morning — from St. Luke’s Gospel. And it is, as we just heard, some of our Lord’s most challenging teachings.

I think it is good if we stop again and listen to the beautiful words that Jesus said in today’s passage of the Gospel: “Do to others as you would have them do to you. … Love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

My brothers and sisters, I think in these words we see really the heart of Jesus.

And it is a challenge for us because we are called to follow Jesus and to have a heart like Jesus. When we think of our own hearts, sometimes our hearts are divided. So often our hearts lead us astray. But today let us take our heart and offer it to Jesus — and he will offer his heart to us. A heart of mercy and love.

St. Dominic knew this, the saints and disciples in every age knew this.  St. Paul was amazed at how we can be changed by the grace of God. He once wrote: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me"²

So we can know that it is possible for us to transform our hearts. St. Paul in the second reading of today’s Mass makes that promise. He says: “Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we call also bear the image of the heavenly one.”

Obviously, it is not easy. It is not like a magic thing where you can say, “well today I have these feelings in my heart and tomorrow I’m going to be totally different.” It takes, my dear brothers and sisters, the grace of God. And it takes a lot of work on our part.

So mercy is the overflow of love, and love takes practice. And love is not easy. As we all know, sometimes it’s hard to love even the people who love us. And Jesus is commanding us to go far beyond that, to love those who hate us. 

That kind of love is more than a feeling. It takes a serious decision on our part, an act of the will. We have to “decide” to love — make a decision to love as Jesus loves, to be merciful as our Father is merciful.

It really requires a new heart. That is what we are asking for today in a special way. So today let us renew our love for Jesus and our decision to live with the heart of Jesus.

And it’s beautiful because Jesus is promising us today that we can love with that same kind of love. As he says: “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.” It’s possible. Again, we need the grace of God and our decision to try to imitate Jesus and to have his heart.

So it means, in a practical way, making sacrifices — little sacrifices in our daily lives. Always looking for little ways to be generous. And the beautiful thing is this is how God’s Kingdom of Mercy grows. This is the beautiful mission that we have in our lives. To help God’s love and mercy spread throughout the world.

Again, let us ask for the grace to love others as God loves us. God loves us without measure. Jesus opened his heart on the Cross and died for every one of us. Even the ungrateful. That’s what love without measure looks like.
 
And my brothers and sisters, we are made to do great things, to do beautiful things for God. But we need to seek the heart of Christ, we need to give everything we have to God. All for Jesus.

This is how the saints lived. And this is how Jesus calls us to live. And he will help us and guide us if we trust in him, and we are faithful to his Word.

So let us continue to try to be more forgiving, to be understanding of others — especially our loved ones, those who are closest to us.

And let us ask Jesus for the courage to open our hearts and to have a generous spirit. To love other people with that same great love that he has for us — to the point, as we know, of giving his life for each one of us.

It is a beautiful day to begin again, especially because it is an opportunity to follow the motto of your centennial celebration, keeping the faith for the next century: bringing Christ’s light into the Eagle Rock community and beyond.

How are we going to do that? If we try to have the heart of Jesus. He’s with us, with him we can do everything.

So today we ask especially for the intercession of St. Dominic and may the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Angels, help us that we might always seek the heart of her Son, Jesus.