30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) - 25 October 2026
25th October 2026
"Every person is an infinitely loved child of God, making it impossible to love God without loving humanity." - St Charles de Foucauld
A reflection on today's Gospel message taken from Blessed Fulton Sheen's Life is Worth Living, Chapter 43: The Law of Love:
Forgiveness is love in action and love means sin-bearing. Forgiveness can only be accomplished by sin-bearing which means a cross to God and to us! Our blessed Lord said, If any man will be my disciple let him take up his cross and follow Me. The meaning of the cross is love bearing the sin of the beloved because of oneness with Him. We can know the sin-bearer, Christ, only as we bear the sins of others. We are redeemed in order to be redeemers and we are not saved until God makes us saviours. A Christian has to go with our Lord into the Garden of Gethsemane and must pass from there to Calvary, filling up in his body what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ for his body’s sake, which is the Church.
We cannot, like Pilate, wash our hands and say, “I am innocent of the blood and sufferings of the world.” If the Church is a church, it is a body of sin-bearing people who love with the love of God shed abroad in their hearts. They can forgive because they’ve been forgiven. They who have been loved can become lovers. Unless the Church of Christ is united by love with the whole of mankind, then the sin of the world is the sin of the Church; the disgrace of the world is the disgrace of the Church; the shame of the world, the shame of the Church; the poverty of the world, the poverty of the Church; then it is no Church at all. The Church is not, and can never be, an end in itself. It is a means of salvation for the world, not just our own sanctification. We cannot save ourselves alone. We pray in the context of “Our Father,” not “My Father;” “Our daily bread,” not “My daily bread.”
The Church is the agent of salvation for mankind. It is not a refuge of peace; it is an Army preparing for war. We seek security but only in sacrifice; this is the mark of the Church and the hallmark of the cross. If the sin of our modern slums and the degradation they cause; if the sin of our overcrowded houses and the ugliness and vice they bring; if the sin of unemployment with the damnation of body and soul; if the sin of the heartless and thoughtless stand out against the squalid and degrading poverty of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; if the sin of commercial trickery and dishonesty and the wholesale defrauding of the poor; if the sin of prostitution and the murder of women and children by disease; and if the sin of war that the others have bred; if all is not laid upon the Church as a burden, and upon us as members of the Church, and if we do not feel pain, we are not worthy members of the Church. We have missed our vocation. Christian morality is not just the keeping the Commandments; it’s love, total commitment, and taking upon ourselves the sins of others. This is the new law: Love God; love your neighbour.
A Prayer for Charity
Keep me, O God, from pettiness; let me be large in thought, in word, in deed. Let me be done with fault-finding and self-seeking. May I put away all pretense and meet everyone face to face without self-pity and without prejudice. May I never be hasty in judgment and always generous. Let me take time for all things. Make me grow calm, serene and gentle. Teach me to put into action my better impulses, straightforward and unafraid. Grant that I may realise it is the little things of life that create differences and that in the big things of life we are one. And, O Lord God, let me not forget to be kind! Amen.