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 1, 2015: That we may be called children of God...

That we may be called the children of God…  

Are you ready to be a saint?  

  Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints -- a day devoted to those who have been beatified, that is, determined to be in heavenly bliss with the Lord, and then canonized, placed in the Church's calendar of saints.  So perhaps it is not surprising that our Gospel reading from Matthew focuses on the beatitudes, that declaration of blessedness that we hear about in the Sermon on the Mount, a state of blessedness for which we strive our entire life long.  But how do we get there?  Most notably, it is though our ongoing struggle, ever moving through death to life in Christ, and through our efforts to enter ever more deeply into that relationship that ultimately leads to perfect union.

  As Psalm 24 reminds us, we too long to see God's face, and that very longing is itself a means of transformation.  Opening ourselves to the struggle that is life and finding meaning in it, we strive to be sinless, with clean hearts, allowing God to dwell in us in relationship, living, as 1 John states, in that love that the Father bestows on us, as children of God, looking forward to seeing the Lord as he is, revealed in all his glory, united to us in perfect union.

  The lives of the saints demonstrate that Christ was indeed revealed in them.  The Book of Revelation tells us that they have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  Thus, marked with God's seal, the saints are now in perfect union with God, that union which is our goal, blessed, in that state of beatitude that causes us to rejoice and be glad -- because Christ is revealed, not only on the Mount, that space of biblical transformation, but in us as well.  So, enter in, accept the challenge of living the beatitudes, and open to the transformation that is ours as we live -- one in the communion of saints -- to reveal Christ to our world! 

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

Image source:  Wordle