Our neighbor is anyone and everyone, unconditionally, no exceptions.

 

Thirtieth Sunday in OT A  2023

For parts of the last two weeks, I was on my annual retreat – an eight day silent, contemplative Ignatian retreat at a Jesuit retreat house in Gloucester, MA.  I have participated in this silent retreat atmosphere for the last fifty years in this retreat house known as Gonzaga Eastern Point.  This annual retreat is such a blessing to my life.  Its purpose is to deepen your relationship with God as a God who loves unconditionally and that our response to God is gratitude and to return our love for God.

Now if this is true confessions, I did sneak out on the last night for dinner in Gloucester with Fr Al Delmonte and my sister Jean.  Fr Al and my sister Jean were on this retreat as well.  But to be clear, other than that one exception, silence and prayer with the Lord was the retreat atmosphere.

As I pray over this Gospel of the two great commandments – love of God and love of neighbor – this retreat further convicted me of the inextricable link between these two commandments.  One cannot love God without loving all that is of God.  Our love of God leads us to love and serve and care our neighbor.

If you ask yourself, what does God want of us, what is God’s priority for us?  God’s priority for us is that we love our neighbor as ourself.   For Jesus, our neighbor is anyone and everyone, unconditionally, no exceptions.  To say again, for Jesus, our neighbor is anyone and everyone, unconditionally, no exceptions.

 

The metaphor that is meaningful to me is that our of Jesus in the “fixed tabernacle” here in Church leads us to reverence Jesus in “mobile tabernacles” in our lives – that is to say, Jesus is present in our neighbors wherever and whenever we encounter them.

 

Yes, the great commandment begins with our encounter with Jesus.  Please God we continuously seek to deepen our relationship with the Lord.  My retreat helps me to focus on what is most important in my life.  The Lord accompanies wherever I find myself.  I pray each day for the spiritual sightedness to recognize that all is a gift of God. and His presence is with me each and every moment of the day.

 

 

 

As I often remind myself, if I am too busy to pray, then I am too busy.  Something else must give.

 

Our encounter with Jesus leads us to those Jesus loves.  All of humanity are the recipients of the love of Jesus.

 

One of the ways I like to pray the two great commandments is the God-given challenge to EXPAND YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD

Expanding your neighborhood includes the member of your family that is so difficult to get along with.

Expanding your neighborhood include the people you disagree with:  perhaps their sexual lifestyle; their way of practicing their religion; their racial views; their political views;  whatever it is that gives you cardiac arrest.

As we think globally, EXPAND YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD doesn’t give us the right to invade another country.  As we ponder the destructiveness of war in the Middle East with Hamas, the Israelis, and the Palestinians and equally the tragedy of war with Russia and Ukraine, we pray for peace.  EXPAND YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD means that we reverence and respect the dignity of those who are different than ourselves.

Love your neighbor, no exceptions.

Meaningful discipleship is not found in the mere observance of law.  Meaningful religion is lived out in a triangle of love – love for God, love for others, and love for self.  In that triangle of love is found the secret of a fulfilling life on earth and a foretaste of the life to come.

In our reflection on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Pope Francis challenges us with the meditation that each day we have to decide whether to be a Good Samaritan or indifferent bystanders as we come upon the needy and the hurting people of our community.  The Pope asks:  “Will we bend down and to touch and heal the wounds of others?”

Our intimacy with the Lord will be based on the love and intimacy we have shared with all of God’s people.  The first Scripture reading from the book of Exodus concretizes Jesus’ teaching.  The alien, the orphan and the poor are our neighbors.  Immigrants whether documented or undocumented, saints or sinners, every member of LGBTQ, your family member whom it is most difficult for you to

 

 

relate to is your neighbor to be loved and is the barometer of the depth of our love of God.

The implication is that loving our neighbor means more than being kind to our friends and relatives, or to the person who lives next door. Loving one’s neighbor means doing right by any widow or orphan: seeing that the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered, that the poor have their basic needs met, that the unemployed do not suffer from want, that the young are educated and the old are cared for.

To do less is to fail in our love for neighbor.

The commandments to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbor as oneself are the heart and soul of Christian morality.

Then St. Paul in the second Scripture in his Letter to the Thessalonians emphasized thar we must walk our talk in living the commandments of love.  The actions of our lives need to witness to the love and care we have for one another.

With each Eucharist we celebrate, in the Penitential Rite we acknowledge the areas of our life in which Jesus is not yet Lord, the ways that we have not loved God and our neighbor.  Thankfully and gratefully, we are the recipients of the merciful love of Jesus.  I am broken and yet I am welcomed into Christ’s presence.

It has been said that if some of the gatekeepers of the Catholic Church had been present at the Last Supper, Jesus would have dined alone.  To pray about this statement, we may find a grain of truth.

Yes.  We are flawed human beings who are continuously who are the recipients of the merciful and forgiving love of Jesus.

As we have forgiven, so also are we to forgive.  To repeat, we are to love our neighbor, no exceptions.

Have a Blessed day.