+LOVE BEARS ALL THINGS 4th Sunday C, 2022
Our readings this morning are closely interrelated in that we have heard from St Paul’s a beautiful description of what love means for each of our lives. As Christians each one of us has been called to love even as Christ has loved us even to laying down our lives for one another.
We may have the gift of prophecy like Jeremiah of whom we heard of in the first reading or we may comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge as did the great St Thomas Aquinas whose memorial we celebrated last Friday, we may have all faith so as to move mountains or we may give away everything we own to the poor, even hand over our bodies as a way to boast, but if we don’t have love, we gain nothing.
Jesus in our gospel tells the people in the synagogue where he grew up after reading from the prophet Isaiah, that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.. to bring glad tidings to the poor.. to proclaim liberty to captives.. recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” that today this Scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. At first they were amazed at his words but then they turned on him when they heard of God’s love for the gentiles.
Like the people of his own time, peoples everywhere today are looking for a Savior who will free them from sickness, from the awful polarization that is going on in society, from the poverty that has millions in its grip, from the oppression that is causing so many to flee their own land or countries. Our Savior is not very far, really, from any of us if we can accept his loving presence and cooperate in his loving plan. We know from the first letter of St John, that God is love and that “if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.”
Wherever there is patience, St Paul tells us, wherever there is kindness, wherever there is no jealousy or pompousness, wherever one does not seek his or her own interests, is not quick tempered, there is God. Our Savior is ever at work in human hearts when there is no desire to brood over injury, when there is no rejoicing over wrongdoing. Our Savior is present whenever a person rejoices in the truth, whenever a person “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Through Jesus, God is constantly at work in our world, wherever there are the eyes of faith to perceive. Without the perception of how God’s love is at work, our hearts are closed. And isn’t this what happened to the people of his own hometown when they became upset about when he told them of the woman in the Elijah story and then of the Syrian leper in the Elisha story who were both gentiles. To think of God’s saving power extending to gentiles was blasphemy for the very persons one would expect to be closest to Jesus. I’m reminded of that old saying: “familiarity breeds contempt.”
What will bring us all together as a human family will be the love of God at work in each one of our lives. The grace of realizing this is humbling for it is so freely given and can only be received as gift. Christ’s Body and Blood given to us in this Eucharist, tells of all that God has in store.
Jer. 1:4-5, 17-19; 1 Cor. 12:31-13:13; Luke 4;21-30