Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Feast of Saint Valentine, priest and martyr! In the centuries since Saint Valentine’s life and death, some rather curious customs have arisen to “celebrate” the saint’s witness to the love and faithfulness of Jesus Christ...but felicitously, our Gospel this morning has a word or two that might help us put the (Sacred) Heart back into our observance of a day so often devoted to saying or writing “I Heart You” and the like.

In our Gospel, a young man approaches Jesus and calls him “Good Teacher.” And Jesus balks at this, saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” For a very long time, that seemed to me like a completely puzzling thing for Jesus to say. I mean: of course Jesus is good! And of course Jesus, being fully God, would be completely cognizant of his goodness being, as God, the source of goodness! So what gives?

At this time in my life, though, it seems to me that what Jesus is truly asking here when he responds to the young man is this: “Good on whose terms? What, really, do you mean by good? Do you mean your personal notion of good, whatever it might be? Or do you mean the terrible, wild, solemn, raucous, joyful, brilliant, inscrutable, quiet, devastating Goodness of God that, to really know, you must consent to unknowing—you must allow this Goodness to empty and dispossess you of every inferior good and every shadow of the Good that you might claim as high or great? Because being good on your terms may not have anything to do with true Goodness. You may discover that true Goodness looks more like a cross than you’re comfortable with. So consider readjusting your perspective here: rather than foisting your goodness onto God, learn Goodness from God. Learn that only God is Good.”

If, holding this understanding of Jesus’ words in our minds and hearts, we were also to consider that goodness is love in action; that truth is the splendor of love and the shine of the good; that beauty is the shape/form of love; that God, being Love (as the Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus and the first letter of Saint John affirms) is the wild ground of Love’s doing, the inscrutably brilliant source of Love’s splendor, the dreadfully awesome pattern of Love’s form…then maybe we can also come to consider this: that if we would truly know Love, we would do well to receive it from the nail-wounded hands of the One who truly is Love; if we are to love anyone or anything truly, we will love with God’s love, we will love for God’s sake, and in loving we will love God in others.

In doing so, perhaps we might even find ourselves becoming the Love with which we love, falling ever more in Love with the One who is Love.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+