📖 Homily Today

The Measure That Builds Up

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in the markets of Jesus' day, a merchant would pour grain into the fold of your cloak. An honest one pressed it down, shook it together, and kept pouring until it spilled over your hands.

That is the image Jesus leaves us with today: "a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap." And then the warning: "For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you."

Both readings today ask us one question: what measure are we using with one another?

In Corinth, the measure was knowledge. Some Christians understood correctly that idols are nothing, so meat offered to them was harmless. They were right. But their being right was wounding believers with tender consciences who could not yet see it that way.

So Paul writes those famous words: "Knowledge inflates with pride, but love builds up." And then he says something startling. He does not win the argument. He surrenders it: "If food causes my brother to sin, I will never eat meat again."

Why? Because, he says, "when you sin in this way against your brothers and wound their consciences, weak as they are, you are sinning against Christ." Christ so identifies with the weakest member that whatever wounds them wounds him.

Saint Augustine, reflecting on this very verse, taught that knowledge without charity only swells a man up, while charity builds him into a temple of God. Brothers and sisters, we can be doctrinally correct and spiritually empty. Being right is not the same as being loving.

Then in the Gospel, Jesus takes our measure and stretches it beyond anything natural: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." Lend expecting nothing back. Give without keeping score.

And notice the reason he gives. Not because it works. Not because they deserve it. But because "you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked." This is family resemblance. This is what it looks like to have God's own blood in your veins.

The Catechism puts it plainly: Christ died out of love for us while we were still his enemies, and so the Lord asks us to love as he does, even our enemies.

My friends, let us be honest about where this touches us. There is the relative whose words still sting years later. The coworker who took credit for your work. The neighbor whose opinions you find not just wrong but offensive. The person in this parish you love to correct.

Today's readings do not ask us to pretend they are right. They ask us to stop measuring them with the small cup of our resentment and start pouring out the overflowing measure God has poured into us.

And where is that measure poured? Here, at this altar. In a few moments God will hand us his own good measure, pressed down and overflowing: his Son, given for us while we were still enemies, kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, which includes every one of us.

We cannot receive the Body of Christ in our hands and despise the Body of Christ in the pew beside us. Communion makes the demand and gives the grace.

So here is one step this week. Choose the person hardest for you to love. Pray for them by name every day, and do one concrete good for them: a phone call, a kindness, or simply surrendering the last word in an argument.

Let love, not knowledge, build up. "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."

Amen.

Sources Consulted - St. Augustine, *On Christian Doctrine* and commentary on 1 Corinthians 8:1 - St. Ambrose, *Exposition of the Gospel of Luke* - St. Thomas Aquinas, *Commentary on 1 Corinthians* and *Catena Aurea* on Luke 6 - *Catechism of the Catholic Church*, nn. 1822–1829, 1972, 2842–2845 - Pope Francis, *Evangelii Gaudium* (on preaching and mercy) and *Misericordiae Vultus* - Pope Benedict XVI, *Deus Caritas Est* - *The Navarre Bible: St. Luke* and *The Navarre Bible: Corinthians* - Word on Fire / Bishop Robert Barron, homilies on Luke 6:27-38