Reflections on Sunday Readings    


Are We Far from
--OR close to--
the Kingdom of God?


(By Fr. Stephen OMI)

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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Last Update: November 3, 2024