Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time YrB 2024
Ordinary Time • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 20 viewsThe most difficult and yet clearest basis for the Christian life is to love God totally, seeking the good of the other, God, as other, for we tend to do it for ourselves. And that implies something more difficult, loving our neighbor, for God is love, not only of us, but also of our neighbor. This is the basis of all virtue. And this is difficult, but makes an easy examination of conscience. That is the core of life in God, getting caught up in unself-conscious obedience to and worship of God and thus becoming like God on the human level towards others, which implies suffering as Jesus suffered. Amen.
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Transcript
Title
Title
Love God; Love People
Outline
Outline
It is so clear and so difficult
It is so clear and so difficult
That is, the basic, most fundamental, and chief commandment: love God totally
It is so difficult because we think of loving God for our good or perhaps the good of our group and that is not the love we are talking about. Love is, says St Thomas Aquinas, “seeking the good of the other” to which has been added “as other” - i.e. not because it benefits us in some way, but because he is who he is. We seek his good, not that we can actually add to his good, but because he is who he is, so “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And, of course, he must tell you what this means and that is why He speaks of “keeping, as long as you live, all his statutes and commandments which I enjoin on you.” It does, as he goes on, benefit us, but we do not do it for our benefit. It benefits us by bringing us into unity with ultimate reality.
And it implies something more difficult
And it implies something more difficult
“‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” This is not telling us to love ourselves but is assuming that we seek our own good (unless we suffer from masochism); this seek one’s good is the measure of how one should seek the good of the other person. And here is the basis of all virtue: humility before God and the other, prudence, justice plus, fortitude, and in many areas temperance. We exercise them in an unlimited fashion towards God and on the human level towards others.
God is hard to really love for we tend to always want things from him, to manipulate him, and humans are hard to love for we want to prefer ourselves and they are fallible.
But that is the core of life in God
But that is the core of life in God
We get caught up in unself-conscious obedience to and worship of God; we become like God on our human level, which is what “as ourselves” means, as we seek the good of others as he does to the degree we can.
Do that and you will be a friend of God in the classical definition of friendship. Do that and you will suffer with Christ, for that what it cost him to love.
Do that, and we have on Jesus authority, that we have fulfilled all that it means to be his follower.
Amen. So be it.
