Most Reverend José H. Gomez Archbishop of Los Angeles
St. Philip the Apostle Church Pasadena, California February 19, 2022
My brothers and sisters in Christ,1
As I was saying, it is a joy to be with you today to celebrate this Holy Mass, and to bless your Newman Center for our college students and young adults.
And first of all, I want to thank you, Fr. Tony and everyone here in the parish for your commitment, especially to our young people. It is a beautiful witness to your faith, and it is, as we all know, so important for the future of the Church.
I want to say that your patron, St. Philip, and all of the first apostles understood, that the Kingdom of God grows, one heart at a time.
We all remember that beautiful scene from the Acts of the Apostles, of St. Philip opening the Scriptures for the Ethiopian man. That’s how it works! The Kingdom grows through friendships, one heart speaking to another about the love of Jesus.
And that was the vision of St. John Henry Newman, which is obviously the vision of every Newman Center.
Cardinal Newman was one of the great apostles of the modern world, as we probably know, a brilliant writers and thinker, and a beautiful soul.
Cardinal Newman said that the most important question in life, is the question of the human heart. What do we love, and what do we live for? What do we treasure, and what do we set our hearts upon?
Newman’s motto, as again many of you know, was cor ad cor loquitur — “heart speaks unto heart.” And my brothers and sisters, this is the great work, the adventure of our lives.
So let’s ask for that grace to open our hearts to the grace of God and to love God and others as God loves us.
So in the Gospel today, we heard how Jesus reveals what it is that we should be looking for. He reveals to us — the heart of God.
Just let us listen to his words again, as we just heard in the 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.”
Mercy is the heart of God, and mercy is the name of God. The whole Bible is the story of divine mercy. His mercy is written on every page. His mercy fills the earth and it is all around us; his mercy extends to the heavens and watches over us.2
And in Jesus, God’s mercy becomes a man, a child born in a mother’s womb who comes to share our human lives, our joys and sorrows.
So Jesus comes to reveal the heart of God, and he comes to show us the path we must travel to enter into God’s heart, into the heart of divine mercy.
The apostles knew this. St. Paul was amazed at how we can be changed. He once wrote: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."3
And my brothers and sisters, we can know that same amazement, that same transformation in our hearts. And St. Paul makes that promise today in the second reading of today’s Mass: “Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we call also bear the image of the heavenly one.”
But obviously, it’s not something easy to do. It’s not like some magical thing. It takes the grace of God. And it also takes hard work on our part.
So we can notice today in the passage of the Gospel how Jesus does not just tell us “about” God’s love and mercy. He commands us to practice it. He’s telling us that we discover the mercy of God, by “doing” mercy in our own lives.
Mercy is the overflow of love, and as we know, love takes practice. And it’s not easy. Sometimes, as we know, it is 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.
So that kind of love is, obviously, more than a feeling. It takes a serious decision on our part, an act of the will. In a sense, to practice what Jesus is asking us to do, we need to make a decision to love.
And in the first reading of today’s Mass, we learn how King David learns what it means to love God. He tries to practice it.
He has the chance to kill his enemy, Saul. And as we know, Saul has been hunting David, he wants to execute David, out of jealousy and fear. Now David has the chance to strike back, and what does he decide?
As we just heard: “Today, though the Lord delivered you into my grasp, I would not harm the Lord’s anointed.”
So my brothers and sisters, to love as Jesus loves, to be merciful as our Father is merciful — it requires a new decision of our heart. And it requires a new vision of what we are called to do, how we are called to love God and to love one another.
So we need to see people just as God sees them.
God loves us even when we don’t love him back. This is the mystery of salvation. Jesus tells us today, God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” God loves without measure.
Jesus opened his heart on the cross and died for every one of us, even the ungrateful and the bad. That’s what real love — love without measure looks like.
Again, it’s very challenging. So today, we need to ask for the grace of God. To try to live in that way. To be merciful as we just heard: “be merciful just as your Father is merciful.”
Let us ask for that grace today and maybe we can start practicing in our daily life. Just the little things, making little sacrifices in our daily lives, always looking for little ways to be generous. Just maybe an act of kindness. Maybe just listening to someone. Maybe forgiving somebody who has done something to us.
This is how we become merciful just as God our Father is merciful. This is a beautiful mission that we can totally trust to the fact that we have the grace of God to be able to do it.
So let us especially today ask Cardinal Newman and St. Philip to intercede for us. Let us ask Mary our Blessed Mother, Our Lady of the Angels, to help us, that we might always seek the heart of her Son, Jesus.
1. Readings: 1 Sam. 26:2, 7–9, 22–23; Ps. 103:1–4, 8, 10, 12–13; 1 Cor. 15:45–49; Luke 6:27–38.