Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 23, 2020: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

How do we live out holiness in the context of community?

  Already in the Torah, God is preoccupied with the holiness of community.  In the Book of Leviticus, God instructs Moses to tell the whole Israelite community that they shall not bear hatred for their brother or their sister in their heart.  Instead, he says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  To follow the precepts of the Lord, to participate in the life he calls you to, is to be holy, and these particular precepts tie us to our community in the most significant of ways.  God calls us to a holiness firmly grounded in the context of community.  In Psalm 103, the psalmist understands all of the blessings he has received – pardon, healing, redemption, kindness, compassion, mercy and more – within the context of community.  To know that God loves us and blesses us allows us to love God and to love all:  this is the essence of community.

  If Leviticus says we are to find holiness in the context of each other, then Paul’s statement to the Corinthians – you are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you – explicitly equates the people with the body as a whole; to destroy the temple would be to destroy the bonds of community.  And our identity comes from that context of community:  community belongs to Christ and Christ to God.  It’s not up to one or the other to consider himself wise, but for all to belong to each other, even those who seem to fall outside the limits of what we define as our community.  If we follow the dictums of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, we are to love our neighbors but also our enemies!  We must bring grace where there isn’t any; we must bring good where there’s evil, rather than increase the evil in the world.  In the context of community, such attention to grace is absolutely necessary.  If we are, as Jesus states, children of our heavenly Father, we know the infinite love that is ours; to know that infinite love should engender the same love in us for others – all others.  If God cares about our enemies so much, loving them as he loves us, who are we to do anything differently?  Community, Jesus is saying, is always bigger, greater, larger than our narrow confines – and in it, we are called to be holy, perfect, just as our heavenly Father is perfect, in love. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, November 9, 2014: You are God's building...

You are God's building...

Where is the temple of the Lord?

This Sunday we celebrate the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome in 324 A.D., a church founded by the Emperor Constantine and given to Sylvester, the bishop of Rome; it became the mother church of all Christian churches to follow.  Our readings therefore all center on different images of temples, from the historical to the future Jerusalem; and from the temple that was Jesus to the temple that is the Church – and all of us – today.

Ezekiel borrows imagery from the book of Genesis that will be echoed again, much later, in Revelation, thus creating a kind of continuity over all human time.  Ezekiel’s temple, with water flowing out from it, is divine in origin and life-giving, revealing God in God’s Creation.  It is a vision filled with hope, a promise of future restoration, of return to paradise… not ours to enjoy just yet, but one day.  Psalm 46 is similarly a song of confidence, reminding listeners that no matter what form chaotic forces might take, God in his holy dwelling will be there to vainquish them, to restore order, multiplying the astounding things he has wrought upon earth.  There, too, the waters of the river gladden the city of God…

Jesus is likewise present on earth to restore order, though in this week’s gospel from John, he certainly seems first to be creating no small amount of disorder, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and driving them out of the temple area.  The activities going on in the temple are not illegitimate:  the Jews had to change their Roman coins for Hebrew ones they could use in the temple area.  But Jesus is there to explain that the temple of his Body has come to be last and greatest sacrifice by which all will be saved – thus, their temple is no longer necessary.  Jesus is the Holy of Holies, yet no one seems to understand this, not even his disciples.  It is only much later that his disciples will remember that he had said all this, and realize that, after his Ascension, they have become God’s building, as Paul tells the Corinthians, all building upon the same foundation, seeking the kind of union only Jesus can create thanks to the Spirit dwelling within them.

The Feast of the Dedication is thus ultimately a celebration of our identity as Church, and church; it is about our capacity to identify ourselves as being members of the Body of Christ on earth, with Jesus dwelling within us.  The next time you enter Our Lady of Mount Carmel and cross yourself, know that you are opening yourself to the body, to be part of this body, so that as a community of many members, we can live this bond that is church more fully, committed to a relationship with Jesus, and with one another.

This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
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