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October 29, 2023: 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle A
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When concerning ourselves with our love for God, there is a certain level of emotion that makes up part of such human love toward the Divine. Considering when a husband loves his wife, and a wife loves her husband, there exists a good amount of heartfelt emotion that accompanies spousal love. It’s of the heart.
Which is why many hearts are broken when one spouse dies, leaving behind the other spouse after, say, 50, 60, or even 70 years of marriage. Or even one year of marriage. The loss of a spouse does not have to be after decades for the other spouse to own a broken heart.
If our love for God is missing the emotional type of love known in spousal love, then our love for God is missing a fundamental part of what it means to love the Lord God. Without spousal, emotional love for the Lord, our love will die out like a burning candle.
However, in our Christian faith, whereas a strong, emotional love for God is necessary, if we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind as Jesus answered, there remains in the living out of our faith another type of love which sees this greatest of virtues as a verb. Where love is an action, a doing. This refers to the many works of mercy consistent with the living out of our Catholic faith. where doing love for the least of God’s people is the very same thing as doing a loving act for God.
The most noted example of love as a verb found in the Gospels is Matthew, chapter 25; feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; visiting and caring for the sick; attending to those forgotten in prison; and people in need of clothing to stay warm. God likes a warm heart, for sure. But he also favors a warm body for all of us, which is far better than a cold body. Or even the coldest body, which is death.
Matthew 25 is love acted out in genuine care and concern for those we know, and those we don’t know, like the stranger, who have a special place in God’s heart. In the first reading from Exodus, God says, “Make sure you give back the cloak to your neighbor who let you borrow it, because it’s the only covering they have to stay warm at night. Especially in the cool nights of the desert.”
God likes a warm body for everyone. I suspect the temperature in heaven is like San Diego year-round. Just right, forever. But if the cloak is not returned to the needy neighbor, then God will be compassionate, the reading says, to the one in need of the cloak, with zero compassion toward the one who kept the cloak for themselves.
Love as an act is a work of mercy; of being other centered in our lives. Selfless. The opportunities to put love into action are near infinite. We live in a very needy world. Assisting Visitation House and the Gospel of Life is one those acts, which I pray we do. This type of love for God is found not only in the human heart, but also in our hands, feet, eyes, ears; all the bodily producers of loving God as a verb, by loving our neighbor.
There is still another excellent way to love God and neighbor. It’s love spoken. And where and how our voices are used in ways that reflect our holy love for God, and our brothers and sisters.
St. Paul writes of this type of love to the faithful Christians in Thessalonica: “For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth … in every place your faith in God has gone forth… “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.”
Paul is writing here to the Thessalonians that they are on fire with the Spirit. He’s rejoicing in their obedience to faith. They love what he taught them, turning from false gods and idols, to the one and only God who responds to them.
As was prevalent in the early Church, and has not disappeared in our time, there must have been all sorts of miraculous manifestations of God’s presence with these believers. All produced by their faith, taught to them by Paul the teacher.
For us, this way of expressing our love for God, and for that of neighbor, is to sound forth, through our voice, our faith in Jesus, in every place our faith goes forth with us. This can be difficult in a culture that demands you keep God quiet in certain sectors of his creation.
But if we love God in the way Jesus answers the question posed by the scholar of the law, then our spoken faith will follow us in all places we go. And we will have no fear of speaking it. This way of loving God and neighbor is much needed today.
One final form of love realized in loving God and neighbor is found in religious truth. Alongside the other forms of love mentioned already; emotion, works of mercy; speaking our faith everywhere. Alongside these forms of love is the highest form of love there is; speaking religious truth centered in our faith.
The highest form of love in religious truth is not affirmation, or agreement, or making sure another person is not offended. Anyone who does not offend another person has their mouth closed all the time. Someone, somewhere in the world is offended by everything we say.
The highest form of love in our faith is to speak the truth, without twisting or changing it, demoting it, or falsifying it in any way. Everyone deserves the truth. They can do with it what they want, but they deserve the truth of what Jesus has taught us through his Church. In other words, we do not allow our egos or personal thoughts to push aside our Lord’s superior teaching.
This highest form of love for God and neighbor is also the hardest to live. But the Saints we celebrate this coming week, they show us how it’s possible.