Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Readings

Today, Jesus teaches the people that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. It seems simple enough until we begin to define “love”.

The ancient Greeks were so enamored with the concept of love that they felt it necessary to define love by the object or receiver of that love. Eros meant self love, filios meant love between people, and agape meant love between God and the people He created.

Loving ourselves involves first accepting our imperfections and submitting the unredeemed areas of our life to the grace of redemption. Such abandonment is risky because the person we think we are may not even resemble the person God intended us to be. Additionally, we are not capable of loving God, except through the Holy Spirit who takes our imperfect love and transforms it into perfect love which is acceptable to God. Therefore, we must struggle to allow God to love us more so in turn we can love God back with a more perfect love.

Loving our neighbor means more than just accepting them and allowing them to be. We must pray for our neighbors, so they become holy and attain to the gift of eternal life offered by Jesus’ suffering and death on a cross. Our neighbor is everyone loved into existence by a loving God. Therefore, our attitude toward all is that they are greater than we are, and we need to be thankful for the grace to pray for them, fast and sacrifice for them, and deny ourselves for the sake of their salvation.

Loving God with our whole being means sacrifice and a willingness to abandon our free will and submit it to the will of the Father. St. John of the Cross said, “If we want the All, then we must give all.” The all includes all our guilt, all our shame, and our ego. Only God can heal and make us whole and in turn holy and nothing is impossible for God.

When we have done the things discussed above, then we are ready to learn how to love God with our whole heart, our whole mind, and our whole spirit, and our neighbor as ourselves.

May God continue to make us whole,

Deacon Phil