30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) - 29 October

 

 

A reflection on today's Gospel by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:

 

"Our aim is to imitate the life of Christ Himself. This does not mean we have to be born in a stable or visit Egypt, or dispute our teachers at the age of twelve, or change water into wine. It means each of us should do what Christ would have done in our place. We are not to copy Christ as a student will copy a great master in an art gallery, but we are to have the spirit of Christ in us.

 

"We return to the law that should govern all of our moral life. We repeat, because it is so important, what Our Blessed Lord said, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the Commandments. And the second is like to this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self.’

 

"Notice all the Ten Commandments were summed up in love. You never can have love except by and through a person who is opposite you.

 

"Now who is the person opposite you? God and neighbour. That is why when we are in love with someone we speak of ‘our’ love. There’s a bond uniting the two of us so the basis of moral life is an earthly trinity. Just as there is the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in heaven, so on earth there is a trinity of moral relations: I, thou, and God. Just as there is a dialogue between me and you and God, so there is the eternal dialogue of love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

"Our Blessed Lord spoke of the heavenly Trinity as the model of this earthly trinity of love the night of the Last Supper. These were His words—He was talking about how He revealed the Father’s love to us—and He said to His heavenly Father that: ‘The love Thou hast bestowed on Me may dwell in them and I, too, may dwell in them.’ You observe the norm of our love of neighbour is not just the love we have for ourselves, but the love Christ has for us forming the foundation of love.

 

"The two Commandments, love God and love neighbour, sum up the Ten Commandments which refer to love of God and love of neighbour. The first three Commandments are related to God; the last six Commandments are related to neighbour. Between the first three and the last six comes the Fourth, Honour thy father and thy mother. God put this in-between the two because the parents in the home take the place of God and obedience to parents is a very high form of justice related to neighbour and to God […] it is a bond between both God and neighbour. The justice we owe our parents is close to the justice we owe to God and related to the justice we owe our neighbour. After God, it was our parents who gave us life and this Fourth Commandment is the Commandment which provides for the future of our civilisation.

 

"In the other commandments, the Fifth to the Tenth, Our Blessed Lord said that we were to love our neighbour as ourselves. How do we love ourselves? We love ourselves very much. But there are also some things we do not like about ourselves. We hate ourselves when we are boorish, loud, and insulting to others, or make excessive demands upon our neighbour, or when we tell untruths that hurt our friends. You see we can love and hate ourselves.

 

"We love what is good in ourselves and we hate what is bad. We love what is good in our neighbour, and we hate what is sinful in them. We love the sinner and we hate the sin. We love the neighbour as a spiritual self, but we do not necessarily love him as a carnal self. Our Blessed Lord tied together love of Himself, love of neighbour, and love of ourselves. There could be two great errors: one is to love God without loving our neighbour, and the other would be to love our neighbour without loving God. We are often invited to take part in brotherhood causes; there’s much talk of the brotherhood of man. All that is very good and true, but how can we be brothers unless we have a common Father? To leave the Fatherhood of God out of the brotherhood of man is to make us all a race of illegitimate children.

 

"The love of neighbour is not to be standardised solely upon our love of ourselves, but rather upon the way our Lord has loved us. He says, ‘This is My Commandment, that you should love one another as I have loved you.’ But who is my neighbour? The one who lives next door? We can never tell in advance who is our neighbour. The neighbour can be a friend, just as our blessed Lord was a friend of Lazarus, and the neighbour could be an enemy, as was the case of the man who was injured on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho […] Our Blessed Lord said, ‘But I tell you, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who persecute and insult you.’ Love of enemies is actually the touchstone to prove whether our love is truly divine."

 

(Your Life is Worth Living)

 

 

 

Lord Jesus, You are the Way, the Truth and the Life. Grant us the grace and courage to follow You as You lead the way to God the Father. Send the Holy Spirit to envelope our minds and hearts that we may clearly see and hear the truth. Let us not be deceived by the lies of the devil. We pray You to bestow Your blessing upon us that we may inherit the eternal life promised to those who keep Your word. Be our guide and light and let us never lose sight of You. Help us to become reflections of Yourself so that we may only ever desire to do the will of the Father. Amen.

 

 

 

The depth of our love for God must be measured by the desire we have to suffer for His sake. It is easy to say the words ‘I love God’, but to put those words into action requires courage, especially in times of adversity and suffering. When the whole world persecutes you for your faith, when friends and family ignore or mistreat you, when financial difficulties or ill health beset you, it is at those times when you can prove your love for God. With simple acts of charity and forgiveness, with trusting patience in the face of suffering, we can use all occasions of trouble and grief as moments to live out our call to love our neighbour and to love God at all times and to offer Him praise at every moment.