GOD CARES ABOUT HOW WE TREAT OTHERS

 HOMILY FOR THE 30^TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (YEAR A)

Rev. Fr. Peter Onyekachi Ezekoka

Exodus 22:20-26        1 Thessalonians 1:5-10        Matthew 22:34-40

Where was I before I was born? Well, the popular answer I’ve heard time and again since my childhood is this: I was in God’s mind. Here is a little story for you to give you some perspective on this. In her book entitled ‘Family Happiness’ a German psychotherapist, Elizabeth Lukas, tells a lovely story of a wee four year-old girl’s conversation with her grandmother. Granny was sitting on the sofa and sipping her tea, and her granddaughter was playing with her toys on her rug. Suddenly the little girl abandoned her toys, clambered up onto granny’s lap, looked up appealingly into her face and enquired: Granny, where was I before I was born? Enchanted by the question, granny beamed with pleasure, took her in her arms for a cuddle and replied: “my darling angel, before you were born, you were hidden and sheltered in love!” The little girl was delighted! She gave granny a smacker of a kiss, scrambled down and danced off making happy noises. Love envelops us; Love holds us; Love guides us, doesn’t it?

In the Gospel, Our Lord puts the two greatest Commandments side by side. These involve love of God and love of neighbour. These two relationships are like two sides of same coin:  you must love the Lord your God… you must love your neighbour as yourself. We need to pay attention to the pronouns in our Lord’s answer. As the Shema states (in Deut 6:5), you must love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. The word ‘your’ indicates a personal relationship, not a distant relationship. Your relationship with God must be personal. Even though transcendent, He is always close to each one of us, and we are to relate to Him actively. Jesus supplied the answer about how we must go about relating actively to our neighbour – to other people created in the image of God: it is by loving them as much as we do ourselves (Lev 19:18). We’ve got to love them well, and we can’t do that unless we truly accept that we ourselves are worthy of love and so are dearly loved by God.

The love of God is channelled out into the world whenever we respond with love to those people who cross our paths (1Jn 4:20), whether we encounter them in the street, in the park, when we go shopping, in church, at work … you can think of plenty of places where you come across other people. The importance of love of neighbour is emphasized by Our Lord because it is through the people that we meet (especially on a daily basis) that God touches and nourishes our personal life. This is the Lord’s way. In the First Reading, Moses is told by God to inform the Israelites that the Law ensures the practical application of active and compassionate concern for the defenceless, the alien, the poor, the widow and the orphan because He, the Lord, Himself abounds in faithful love (Ps 103:8). Once we grasp that, then we have the answer to the question of ‘who our neighbour is’.

Loving God in other people (doing as you would be done by, Mt 7:12), and loving our neighbour as ourselves (accepting that we are as worthy of love as they are), are both important components in the objective of giving our hearts and minds to God. The major block to achieving this objective tends to be that loving other people is all very well in theory, but that putting it into practice is difficult. How difficult? Well, imagine situations that wind you up, perhaps when a passer-by repeatedly chucks litter into your garden, when your work colleague gets a kick out of getting on your nerves, when someone treads on your toes and finds it hilarious, when someone purposely humiliates you and walks away without a care in the world, or when someone in the pew takes pleasure in nipping you verbally. Ouch! These, and similar situations, can be extremely difficult for us to respond to pleasantly. But the truth is that it is in such situations as these that we ourselves encounter God personally (Deut 31:6). Take note and beware: our Christian practice of going to Church regularly and praying every day becomes merely escapism from the real world and our spirituality merely a lot of hot air IF we shut ourselves off from people around us including those with whom we offer worship under same roof. God cares about how we treat others, and it’s vital that we shoulder this burden willingly and respond in practical terms.

We can genuinely profess that we love God when we have accepted that it is our duty to imitate His example (cf. Micah 6:8) in the way we treat other people, and our duty to make sacrifices for Him (Rom 12:1). We are not being called upon to love everyone in a sentimental way, in a flood of feelings, but we do have a duty to love them by doing our duty! Rather than making us weak, love makes us strong, strong enough to benefit the lives of other people (Phil 2:4) and to influence the world positively. Examples of practical love include showing empathic interest in others, doing our best to promote peaceful relationships between people, being there for the broken-hearted, caring for the housebound, nursing the sick, and praying for others - all for the sake of Christ Who loves us so much!

In the light of God’s everlasting and unchanging love for us, we recommit ourselves to Him. Let us pray: O Lord, we entrust ourselves totally to Your tender care. May You, Who loved us from the beginning, send the Holy Spirit to help us to respond to and emulate Your great love for us by loving others as You would have us do. Amen. God bless you.