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24th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)

  1. A French philosopher influential in my younger days, Jacques Maritain by name, begins a delightful essay on prayer with these words: “In us, as well as in God, love must proceed from the Word, that is, from the spiritual possession of the truth, in faith. And just as everything which is in the Word is found once more in the Holy Spirit, so must all that we know pass into our power of affection by love, there only finding its resting place.” In other words, Maritain reflects on the mystery of our three-Personed God to discover how we, made in God’s image, begin to know and love God in a certain sense the way God knows and loves God. In other words, love must proceed from truth and knowledge must bear fruit in love. If either of these conditions is lacking, our prayer is not what it ought to be, our thinking about our faith is not what it ought to be, our lives in the Spirit are not what they ought to be.

  2. Truth and charity must always be linked, either in the way St. Paul links them – “living the truth in love” – or in the way Pope Benedict links them in his recent Encyclical – Living Charity in Truth. It might be helpful to hear what Pope Benedict has to say in the first paragraph of his new Encyclical – Charity in Truth, to which the Lord Jesus bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity... To teach and defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity.”

  3. I have been thinking recently about the question of evangelization, and what we mean by evangelization which is the foremost duty of the Church. I suggest that evangelization has a lot to do with this linking of truth and love, linking what we can call the love of God and the cross of Jesus. Every time I read the Letters of St. Paul, I marvel at how he preached to the Thessalonians and the Philippians and to the Colossians who once were far off from Christ and his gospel but have now been brought near to Christ and his gospel by the power of the Spirit. What is St. Paul doing when he teaches his hearers and admonishes them to live the truth in love? Paul’s preaching is the call of love to which nothing but love can reply. It is the Lord’s call to the greatest possible conformity to the divine pattern. This pattern, of course, is the Lord Jesus as we follow him in the Gospels. (Maritain). Paul announces the gospel of God concerning his divine Son, that is, the truth of faith that God so loved us that he sent his Son to reveal the mystery of the Father’s love and to send us the Holy Spirit to help us love in return. What are we to do? We are to love God with all our hearts and minds and with all our strength, and we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. So many people think that the Catholic faith is a complicated matter of rules and regulations, and do this and don’t do that. Christian holiness consists primarily in charity for charity unites us to God who is our origin and our last end and charity unites us to our neighbors and fellow-travelers along the human pilgrimage. The precept to love God and neighbor leads to what St. Paul calls “the fulfillment of the law”.

  4. With what measure should we love God? St. Bernard tells us “the measure of love is to love without measure”. Of course there are various degrees of love as St. Thomas Aquinas points out. The first degree, essential for all who follow Christ, means to love nothing more than God, nothing contrary to God, nothing as much as God. That’s where the saints begin but do no remain there. What happens to a person who, under the grace of the Holy Spirit, responds to God’s call to love and sets about to practice love of God and love of neighbor? It means to me that the answer is – such a one becomes evangelized and, when one becomes evangelized, then one becomes a liver, a lover and a teller of the Gospel. In other words, once evangelized the person becomes an evangelizer.

  5. What does the person who is evangelized look like? For an answer, I will call upon St. Paul and St. Luke. St. Paul writes – “Brothers and sisters, put on, as God’s chosen ones, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another if one has a grievance against another. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.” St. Luke writes – Jesus said to his disciples: To you who hear, I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other, and from the person who takes your cloak do not hold even your tunic. It must have been very dangerous for Paul Luke to preach the way they did and to call the Thessalonians and Philippians and those in the Lukan community to do away with their idols and their emperor worship and become counter-cultural followers of the real and true emperor who is Christ the Lord. It must have been very difficult for the Colossians and the Romans and the Ephesians to say “Yes” and even “Alleluia” to the Gospel of God. We must remember this was the time of widespread martyrdom. What about ourselves in our very secular age? I do not think that we will be martyred. Perhaps they will lock us up, but not in jail. I think that it is more likely that they will ignore us and hope we go away.