Thirty First
Sunday in OT B 2024
This coming
Wednesday morning as you awaken, hopefully we will know who our next president
will be. We will be overjoyed or perhaps we will be despondent. As important as our political landscape is to
how we live our lives, I suggest that the world will not come to an end, and
may we have always have the context that a far more important event happened
two thousand years ago in the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and
on the day of our baptism when we received the life of Christ Jesus within us.
While the
rhetoric leading up to election day is getting louder and louder and we should
most definitely exercise our constitutional responsibility to vote. Yet, our participation in the mystery of this
Eucharist, our participation in the love and life of Christ Jesus is even more
important than election day.
In today’s
first Scripture reading from the book of
Deuteronomy, this is what Moses has to say, “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our
God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
The
connection between the words of Moses and the Gospel from Mark is very
apparent. Mark’s Gospel reading today
builds on that teaching of love. It
links the Law of Moses to the teaching of Christ. “One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked
him, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied,
"The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all
your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.”
So, today’s
message is the simple message at the heart of our faith, the command to love. You are commanded to love God and to love
everyone.
Now it is so
significant that Jesus is making this
statement that the two great commandments are essentially connected with each
other. Our love of neighbor grows out of and is an expression of our love of
God. If we really love God and pray, we
will be led into active, generous love for someone who needs us. The authenticity of our celebration of the
Eucharist, the genuineness of the time we spend in Eucharistic adoration will
be seen in the love and the service we share with one another. Our right and
duty to vote responsibly is so important, but its importance grows our of our
larger commitment to live life fulfilling the command of Jesus to love God and
one another.
How do I and
how do you show our love of God in the day to day moments of our lives? Many of us need to confess that too often
we live our lives devoid of our awareness of God’s presence in our life. Too often we live in a manner apparently that we don’t need
God, we can shelf Him. Sometimes, God
can be likened to one of the applications on our iPhone to open and shut at
will.
To borrow an
analogy from our IPhone, in this liturgy, we humbly ask for the grace to
experience God in our lives not as an application on the iPhone but rather to
experience God as our very operating system by which everything else in our
lives draws its existence and meaning.
So, as you
continuously use your iphone throughout this day, ask yourself if God is merely
an app on your phone or is your faith the very operating system by which you
live your life. Our relationship of God,
our love of God and love of neighbor is the operating system of our spiritual
journey.
Jesus said
to Peter: “Peter, do you love me?”
Peter says,
“You know I love you. Why are you asking three times? Why are you asking me
this?”
Jesus
responds: “Peter, if you love me, feed
my sheep.”
Love is what
drives this Church on. And love is what we have to begin to judge ourselves on.
Not do we understand. Not do we read enough books or are we on top of career
charts.
We have to
learn how to love. And, of course, that’s what Jesus does.
Jesus has
come not to teach us grammar, not to teach us the wonders of the world, Jesus
has come to teach us how to love. Because we don’t know how. We think we know,
but we still have much to learn.
Why?
Because love
gives, love doesn’t take. There’s nothing in love that takes. It only gives and
gives.
We worship
God because He’s a giver. Have you ever noticed God doesn’t take anything from
us. He gives and gives and gives.
And that is
what He expects of us as Christians.
We’re not to
ask what I get out of things. Will I get this? Will I go to heaven? Will I do
this? Will I do that? This is a waste of time.
What matters
is: will I learn to love, will I learn to appreciate, will I learn to walk
through life knowing that everyone that I see is my brother and my sister and
we are linked together in one long march through this life and into eternal
life.
The question
is not how high you make it in the world, how smart you are, your marks at
school, even. The question is none of these things. These are secondary.
The question
is can you love, are you afraid to love, are you running away from love, or are
you going to follow Jesus’ love which finally leads to a cross? Jesus dies on a
cross to tell us that there is only love in life that carries us through life
into all eternity.
This is what
God intends: that we learn how to love, that we learn how to care, that we
learn how to sacrifice, that we learn how to become human beings.
And in all
of this we are privileged to know that it is Jesus who has taught us, his
children, and continues to teach us, for he is with us all our days, and the
one thing he is teaching us is to learn how to love.
As Meister
Eckhart has taught us, “At the end of the day, we are going to be judged by
love alone.”
May God give
us the grace to love God and to love one another.
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