Today, the universal Church celebrates the solemnity of all the Saints. Historically this practice of honouring the saints started during and after the persecution of the early Christians. Because of the many who were martyred then, it was quite difficult to remember all the dates of their martyrdom. Furthermore, some dates of their death could not be verifiable. Moreover, there were so many of them that their dates exceeded the number of days in the year. Therefore, today’s feast was created in the year 600 or so to cover all the saints in the Church.The 2 Commandments of LOVE
Loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves
Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary time (A)
Moses has received ten commandments from God, yet the Jewish people understood these commandments to have been a summary of hundreds of precepts. Thus, they have come up with 613 commandments all in all. Three hundred sixty-five of these commandments which is equal to the number of days in a single year, are prohibitions. While 248 of these are laws of direction, one for each bone of our body. Of course, the Jews would try to follow all these laws on the letter. However, because of this great number of commands, they would be challenged to know which among these is the greatest of all commandments. So the Pharisees (the group of Jews who are strict in following the letter of the law) went to Jesus and asked him what does he think is the greatest of all commandments. They did this not really for them to know, but just to trap Jesus, to try him…that is to say, to know if Jesus really is a good follower of the law of Moses. Jesus knew what they have in mind, so as usual he took the opportunity to tell them the real meaning, the true motivation, the foundation of all the commandments. He answered them by synthesizing all the 613 commandments into 2 very important laws: the law of loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves.
Our mission is to love therefore. This is what Jesus seemed to be saying to the Pharisees. This is also what he has to say to us now: To love God and to love one another as we love ourselves.
Why do have to love? The answer is why not? God has created in love and through love. Thus, this is also our mission…to love. “Love is the one thing” saint Paul says to the Romans (Rom 13:10) “that cannot hurt your neighbours: that is why it is the answer to every one of the commandments.” St James would affirm St Paul saying: “Well, the right thing to do is to keep the supreme law of the scripture: you must love your neighbour as yourself.”
How do we express our love to God?
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Be with him ( in prayers- personal or communal devotion, reading the Sacred Scriptures everyday, reviewing our relationship with him everyday)
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Let’s endeavour to be our real selves as we know it, before him. Pretending to be somebody else before Him is a great insult to him because he has created us as a unique person.
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Let’s us strive to make him the centre of our lives. This is a great challenge to take because there are many things, persons, events, experiences, and even the circumstances where we are in, that tend to take God out of the picture, out of the drama of our journey through life.
How do we express our love to our neighbours?
Jesus said to love one another…not to love another one. Our first reading today also tells us of the ways to express our love to our neighbours. For instance: ‘If you take another’s cloak as a pledge, you must give it back to him before sunset. It is all the covering he has…what else would he sleep in? This calls us to be concerned to other people in the world. Everytime we throw away leftover food to the bin, have we realized that that ‘waste’ could have been a good single meal for a certain street kid in the Philippines or for a whole family even. Hence, St Paul in our second readings today, reminds us to act really in a Christian way…if we claim to be Christians and proud of it, then we shall express it our actions, in our examples, not to show off but to show that we are really living the Christian values and attitude.
How can we express our love for ourselves?
It is not a selfish way of loving, yet it is another important element that Jesus really has added on in his two-fold command of love. If our mission is to love, we must have that love ourselves so that we’ll have something to give. We just can’t give what we don’t have. Did Jesus love himself? Yes. An example, amidst his busy ministry of preaching, teaching and doing miracles, he really made it sure to have a quiet time for himself, withdrawing himself to pray, to retreat and to get in touch with God. Another way of expressing our love to ourselves is to take care of ourselves.
Now if we say we are in love, how can we stay in love? John Powell, a Jesuit priest writes that the secret to stay in love is DIALOGUE. So to remain in love is to dialogue with God, with our neighbours, with ourselves even. Let’s keep the communication open. Let’s always keep in touch.
So as we go home today let’s ask ourselves: How in love are we to our God? Have we grown in love with our neighbours? Are we taking care of ourselves?
Going on to the desert (with God)
I have been away for over a month. It seems like I’m forever gone, but I’m just enjoying the trek with God on the desert of my life. What do I mean by this? Well, for the last 3 months I had been very busy preparing for my ordination to the priesthood. I was really caught up with the various activities I had to attend to before, during and after my priestly ordination, to the extent that I was almost tempted to focus on the externals rather than on what God has done in and through me. So I went out to the desert with Him. I mean I spent sometimes with him alone, with no one else, thanking him for the great gift he’s given me, and for the abundant graces he’s poured on all of us. I did not ‘literally’ go out to the desert, but I just emptied my heart, my self for God to come in and journey with me. And truly I have never experienced being so closed to him at that moment. I did not go and spend days with him, but just in the particular moments of my day, and it seemed to me I was in the presence of God for eternity. In the desert of my life, I met God. I felt his closeness and I learned to be more appreciative of what He has done to me. It was in the desert of my life that I understand all the more the meaning of the ‘footprints in the sand.” It was in the desert that I had experienced the simple beauty and the pure love that God has for all of us.
No wonder Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King had called “the desert, the place of God’s closenes.” It is therefore worth reading their story on the desert they had experienced in their lives.
In her biography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how, shortly after her conversion to Catholicism, she went through a painful, desert time. She had just given birth to her daughter and her decision to have the child baptized, coupled with her profession of faith, meant the end of her relationship with a man she deeply loved. She suddenly found herself alone. All her old supports had been cut off and she was left with no money, no job, few friends, no practical dream, and no companionship from the person she loved the most deeply in this world. For a while she just stumbled on, trusting that things would soon get better. They didn’t. She remained in this desert.One day, not knowing what else to do, she took a train from New York to Washington to spend a day praying at the National Shrine of Our Lady. Her prayer there was wrenching, naked. She describes how she laid bare her helplessness, spilling out her confusion, her doubts, her fears, and her temptations to bitterness and despair. In essence, she said to God: “I have given up everything that ever supported me, in trust, to you. I have nothing left to hold on to. You need to do something for me, soon. I can’t keep this up much longer!” She was, biblically speaking, in the desert—alone, without support, helpless before a chaos that threatened to overwhelm her—and, as was the case with Jesus, both in the desert and in Gethsemane, God “sent angels to minister to her.” God steadied her in the chaos. She caught a train back to New York and, that very night, as walked up to her apartment she saw a man sitting there. His name was Peter Maurin and the rest is history. Together they started the Catholic Worker. We should not be surprised that her prayer had such a tangible result. The desert, scripture assures us, is the place where God is specially near. Martin Luther King shares a similar story. In, Stride Towards Freedom, he relates how one night a hate-filled phone call shook him to his depths and plunged him into a desert of fear. Here are his words: An angry voice said: “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hand, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.“I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t take it alone.” At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. God sends his angels to minister to us when we are in the desert and in the garden of Gethsemane. |
Junjun FAITHBOOK 