30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

There is a common theme in our readings, and in today’s Gospel, one of caring and of love. To love our God, and to love and care for one another. To show true compassion and caring for all of God’s children, and in doing so, to show our love for God himself by our actions.

A true intimacy with our Lord, requires our attention to Him, and to truly follow His word. As we were told in John 2:4, anyone who says I have known Him, but does not follow His word, is a liar. We cannot have duplicity in us with respect to God’s teaching and have actual intimacy with Him. As Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, there are two commands that everything else in terms of God’s teaching are predicated upon. To love God with all our mind, soul, and heart, and to love one another. We are each of us created in God’s image, and this is critical to remember because every person is a reflection of God and needs to be treated accordingly. Can you imagine how you would respond if you were encountered Jesus on the street? Would you greet Him? Would you go out of your way to help Him and to show love for Him? The fact is we encounter Him every day in those we meet because they are created in His image, this then gives us much to think about in terms of how we address and interact with  every person we encounter. This is especially true of those who are aliens in our land, those who are perhaps vulnerable because of their poverty, their social status, their health, their beliefs, or their ethnicity. Love knows no bounds or limitations when it comes to any of this, there is only the clarity of vision that lets us see the face of Christ in every person we encounter. As a nation we are in a time of deep division. I am not speaking of politics, the ridiculous animosity that is so much a part of that is something that will always wax and wane. There is something far more relevant to us as people of faith – the human person, and through that human person, the image and mark of our creator. In love, there is no illegal alien, there is no race, there is no social standing, there is no sexual orientation, there is no view or judgement of a person’s ability to house, cloth, or feed themselves, or perhaps whether they are even particularly likeable as an individual. There is only a registering of compassion when we see another of God’s creations that allows us to look past all the extraneous elements that we sometimes get hung up on. There is a purity of thought and intention that speaks to the person, and to our God that each of us needs to strive for.  We need to picture ourselves on a daily basis, standing before our Lord and answering for how we treated each person we have encountered in our lives, and then using that perspective to keep ourselves focused on what is truly important. Every one of us wants and needs pretty much the same things. We seek to be loved, we seek to be included and to be accepted by others, we seek the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, and we seek to have some sense of self-worth and respect. To walk past someone without basic acknowledgement or perhaps human charity sends a very painful and powerful message. One that reinforces their own feelings of being lacking in worth as a human being, and certainly does not convey any sense of the dignity of a child of God – we take all of that away with thoughtless lack of compassion that is all too easy to do, almost reflexively sometimes. This is what we must be ever vigilant against. We must instead be actively seeking for ways to assist our brothers and sisters created in God’s image. We must evangelize by our actions; we must seek to change our small corner of the world by addressing what we can. If we each do this, the effect will be felt because of the sheer number of those involved. This is what God seeks, to have us engaged and looking out for one another in such a way as to eliminate the desperation, the want, and the loneliness that is so prevalent otherwise. This is how we truly show ourselves to be children of God.

Podcast Link

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-v3cz4-f043d3