Reflections
on Sunday Readings
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Are
We Far from
--OR close to--
the Kingdom of God?
(By Fr.
Stephen OMI)
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My dear parishioners
on this 31st Sunday in ordinary time Jesus reminds us of the greatest
commandment of our religion. When Jesus was questioned by a Scribe
as to which is the greatest of all commandments, quoting "the
Shema" from the book of Deuteronomy 6: 4-5 (the prayer that
every faithful Jew would recite twice every day) and also coupling
it with the book of Leviticus 19:18: (You shall love your neighbor
as yourself) Jesus confidently answered him saying that the greatest
commandment of all is to love GOD and to love NEIGHBOR. The Scribe
also agreed with what Jesus said that Loving God and Neighbor
are worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
Dear friends, we are created by God to know Him, to love Him and
to serve Him and how we are to know, love and serve Him is by
loving our brothers and sisters. In other words, we are to love
God in loving others. The meaning of the 10 commandments is also
about loving God and loving our neighbor. We find that the first
3 commandments show us how to love God and the last 7 commandments
show us to love our neighbor. They are great reminders to us that
our worship and religious observances are empty when we do not
demonstrate it by our way of life, our love for God which flows
from keeping his commandments and our love for our neighbor demonstrated
in acts of charity.
Dear friends, loving God is easy because God is not visible to
us and we know for sure that God does not expect anything from
us. God does not even need our daily prayers. Whether we pray
to Him or not, God is God and forever He remains the Almighty
God. Whatever we do or say adds nothing to His greatness or even
takes away anything from His greatness. But on the other hand,
loving our neighbor is always difficult and it is a huge challenge.
Loving or caring for our neighbor does not always mean that we
have to support them financially and materially. Sometimes all
that they need from us may simply be just a word of encouragement,
a sincere smile or a gesture of kindness. A warm welcome to him/her
without any discrimination based on gender, age, wealth or social
status might be all that he/she wants to feel that they are loved
by us. Doing these things might not be as easy as we think, because
very often they demand us to make sacrifices of ourselves, our
pride and our ego and in the words of Jesus in Luke 9:23, it would
mean "deny themselves". We must also remember that the
greatest gesture of showing our love towards our neighbor is to
spend time for them in prayer and to go out of our way to reach
them in the name of the Lord to care for them.
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