Homily for
October 23, 2005
Liturgical Year A-Cycle I
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time by Fr. Joshua Nyoni Topic: Loving God emotionally, physically and
intellectually. + + +
Reading I
Ex 22:20-26 Thus says the LORD: "You shall not
molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the
land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If
ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their
cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword;
then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
"If
you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall
not act like an extortioner toward him by demanding interest from
him. If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, you shall
return it to him before sunset; for this cloak of his is the only
covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in? If he
cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate."
Reading II
1 Thes 1:5c-10
Brothers
and sisters: You know what sort of people we were among you for your
sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving
the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that
you became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.
For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth not only in
Macedonia and in Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has gone
forth, so that we have no need to say anything. For they
themselves openly declare about us what sort of reception we had among
you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true
God and to await his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
Gospel Mt
22:34-40 When the
Pharisees heard that Jesus had
silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a
scholar of the law tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in
the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the
Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all
your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second
is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole
law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today’s
Scripture readings call us to examine
our obligations of love of God and neighbor. In Exodus, Moses commands
the
Israelites to care for one another because of God’s special care for
them. In
the Second reading, St.
Paul
exhorts the Thessalonians to imitate his following of the Lord and so
show the
joy of the Gospel they have received.
In
today’s Gospel, the Pharisees are out to disconcert Jesus, as they
always do
“Master, which is the
greatest commandment of the law?” Instead
of
quoting one of the Ten Commandments, as his audience might have
expected, Jesus
quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 [as the first commandment] : “You
must love
the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind…”
For the second commandment, he quotes the book of Leviticus
19:18 “…Love
your neighbor as yourself.”
With these two commandments, Jesus sums
up the
Scriptures, the commandments, the entire Jewish Law, the meaning of
life and in
fact, the entire Gospel.
The question for us today is, "What does it mean to fully
love God?" To
fully love God, we need first, to appreciate and experience God’s love
in our
lives. St.
Paul,
in
writing to the Ephesians says, "How wide and long and high and deep
is
the love of Christ"[3:18].
Of course, to fully appreciate the vastness of the love of God in
Christ is
beyond human capacity. Yet in the Gospels, we have a glimpse of the
love and
compassion Jesus expressed during his life, and on the cross, we see
God’s love
most fully expressed. On the night of Jesus’ betrayal, John records
that "Jesus,
knowing that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father,
he loved
those who were his in the world, he loved them to the end…"[13:1].
Jesus on the cross was the supreme expression of God’s love. Now if God
has
loved us so much [as to die for us on the cross], what he expects of us
is
nothing but to reciprocate that love. How do we do that? We can do that
by
loving him with all our hearts [seat of love], all our souls [our
being-what
makes us who we are], and all our minds [capacity to know].
What it boils
down to is that we are to love God emotionally, physically and
intellectually.
We humans are so foolish at times that with our little
intelligence have
relegated religion, have relegated God to the area of emotions. Someone
said
that when we enter the church, we should leave our reason at the door
and enter
with our emotions. It is something like serving God emotionally without
any
intelligence. While on the other side some serve God intellectually but
without
emotions. God asks us to use our emotions, our intelligence to love
him. St.
Iraneus says, "The glory of God is man fully alive."
Loving God with all our being involves also growing into a
healthy and intimate
relationship with God. That demands concentration and attention as well
as
focusing on God. That will mean being quiet and being able to listen to
Jesus,
letting Jesus talk to us, and enjoying being in the presence of God.
Some of us
when we enter into the church, we never give Jesus a chance to talk; it
is us
talking and talking. We pray the rosary, we say our various everyday
prayers
that we have in our booklets, we never gaze at the Blessed Sacrament –
Please
try also to give him a chance to talk to you. We have to train
ourselves
to the discipline of listening.
The second question is, "What does it mean to love our
neighbor as
ourselves?" How do we love ourselves? Loving ourselves is something we
do
naturally. We don’t need to read books or attend seminars on loving
ourselves.
It’s natural to take care of ourselves. For instance, we feed
ourselves, dress
ourselves, and keep ourselves warm when it is cold. When we are sick,
we take
medicine or go to the doctor so we can feel better. So, when Jesus
commands us
to “love others as ourselves”, he knows how we “love ourselves”.
Self-love is
assumed. Since our natural tendency is to love ourselves, Jesus says,
it is in
that measure and manner in which we are to love our neighbors. The same
measure
of love we give to ourselves must be the same measure of love we are to
give to
our neighbor. What a challenge!
The command to love others is foundational to our
identification as disciples
of Jesus. St
John
says, "If anyone says I love God,
yet hates his brother, he is a
liar. For
anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen cannot love God,
whom he
has not see. And he has given us this command: whoever loves must love
his
brother."[1Jn 4:20-21].
The sign that we follow Jesus is that we love others: "It
is by your
love for one another, that everyone will recognize you as my disciples"
[Jn 13:35].
This new command of love, takes our love to a higher level. No longer
do we
just love one another as we love ourselves but that we must love one
another as
Christ loved us. How did he love us? He loved us with the greatest
love:
"No
one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his
friends" [Jn
15:13].
He became poor, so that we might become rich [ I Cor 8:9].
Love is an
action, not merely an attitude or aspiration. As
C.S. Lewis once said, “Do
not waste time bothering whether you love
your
neighbor: Act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of
the
great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will
actually
come to love him."
May these thoughts
help us to reach the God of Jesus Christ.