+WHERE DOES THE LOVE OF GOD TAKE US? 31st Sunday-B, 2024
Three times in our scriptural readings this morning we heard the greatest commandment of all Scripture. “Hear, O Israel, ..You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” What Jesus adds to it is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
During my lifetime, like so many you gather here this morning, I have heard this commandment and what Jesus adds to it countless times and I must admit, it has always left me with a feeling of discomfort, of feeling deep down of a sense of guilt or of having fallen short of what God is asking of me. Thinking about what I was to say this morning, I came to realize that perhaps what this commandment is meant to do is to ground all of us in an abiding sense of our human weakness, of our need of God’s presence, grace and mercy.
If we are honest, when can we say that we are loving God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds, all our strength? How can any of us really love that deeply, that completely? And doesn’t God know this far better than we ever will, so why, for heaven’s sake does, is our loving Creator asking for such a total gift of ourselves? For, of ourselves, we can hardly begin to live into such continual selflessness.
Many of us have had very loving parents or loving brothers in our monastic context, loving spouses in marriage, loving friends and relatives and they are often examples of living in the love of this commandment. But I doubt they would claim to be living it as fully as Jesus asks.
Where I think both our heavenly Father and Jesus are taking us, is into an understanding of God’s own nature, into our need for their presence and the working of the Holy Spirit at the center of our lives if we are to live with such love. And for me, this is brought home even more intensely when Jesus adds as a second commandment that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Loving my neighbor as myself means loving all those with whom I live, loving all the people who have different views than I do, about who should be the future president of this country. It means loving migrants, refugees, abandoned, it means loving the most vulnerable in the wombs of a mother, the unborn. It means loving that brother or sister who seems intent on giving me a hard time, or making sure I don’t get elated, thinking I’m better than others! With every effort I make to be truly loving, it never takes long to realize my efforts are flawed, falling short of such total surrender.
And yet, isn’t this where God can take hold of the whole of our lives, where we can learn to be truly free and be filled with God’s own divine life. As we have gathered here this morning to listen to God’s word and celebrate the Eucharist we are opening ourselves to an endless mystery, a sharing in God’s own divine life. The consecration of bread and wine into the very Body and Blood of Christ reveal God’s own deepest desire to fill us and all of creation with love.
What was totally impossible for us, now becomes possible through a sharing in Christ’s Body and Blood, a sharing that is to go on all day long. He gives us the perfect example of all that he has commanded us to do, loving his Father with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind and strength, making of us God’s beloved ones. Let us then open our hearts, souls, minds and strength to this most precious and everlasting gift. Amen
Deut. 6:2-6; Heb. 7:23-28; Mark 12:28b-34