Love of God and love of neighbor

 

 

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.