(Every week I put a little commentary on the Sunday Readings into our weekly parish bulletin. Here’s what in ‘Fr Junjun‘s corner’ in this week’s bulletin.)

Fr Junjun Corner 24^th Sunday in Ordinary time year C

“The measure of love is to love without measure,” St Francis de Sales once said. This means loving without counting the cost, loving unconditionally and selflessly, and loving the other even if the other is difficult to love or even seem unlovable. This is the kind of love that Jesus wants us to learn from the parables he told us in our gospel today. We heard of the parable of a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost prodigal son. The message in here is that God the Father loves not only all of us, but he loves each one of us individually. We are all important and priceless in his eyes. If not he wouldn’t have sent and risked his only Son to us and to save us from our sins. In a way Jesus is saying, in the eyes of God nobody is no one because everybody is someone for him. This is wonderful realization but this is not a dispensation for us to keep on sinning.

Like the prodigal son, we are not to be content only with realizing our own sinfulness, value and worth and say: “How many of my father’s paid servants have more food than they want, and here am I dying of hunger!” Rather  we are to make the decision to go back to the loving embrace of the Father, humble ourselves, and say: “I will leave this place and go to my father and say: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you…[I am very sorry!”

We can only realize this in our lives if we keep in mind these two important things: (One) God is always there waiting for us, ready to welcome us back anytime, and (two) We must decide for God now and live in his ways.

A concrete way to decide for God is to spend some times with God in prayer everyday especially in this time when the world and the hearts of everyone need that peace that God can only give.

May you all have a blessed week everyone.

Fr Junjun