I have heard many times people say, “I love my father and mother or I love my spouse more than I can say.” Is this temperate love? What I mean is do we love God more than anything or anyone?
I remember back on my first love. Do any of you remember yours? I was in 7th grade at St. Pius X Parish in Mountlake Terrace just this side of Seattle. Her name was Sheila. I will not give her last name in order to protect the innocent. Anyway, she had pitch black hair and the greenest eyes you would ever have the pleasure of looking into.
Sheila was all I could think about day and night. It lasted a very long time back then. I believe it was 5 days or so. Here I was, in a Catholic school no less, and for those 5 days or so all I could do is think about Sheila with no thought of God. Well, around the 6th or 7th day came Christie C. Again, no last name to protect the innocent! I think you know how this story ends!
So, we may love and indeed we naturally love all that God has created in his love. But, it is necessary that our love be temperate when loving others. Her is some deep thought, but said slowly tells it all: “Only a supernatural or spiritual view of realities can help us to act accordingly. It is necessary for our vision to be that of faith in order for our love of creatures to remain in a just mean.
For faith is properly the virtue by which we may find God through the intermediary of creatures, which are then fully dominated and subordinate by the very fact that faith puts us in contact with the creator. Chomp on those words for a while.
Now that is theological writing. Here is the simple truth. It is saying that through others and God’s creation, we find God.
Isn’t that true in our lives through our experiences? Think about what we feel when we see a beautiful sunrise or the colors of a sunset; the beauty of a mountain valley with wild animals, birds in the sky, lakes and rivers. Maybe it is a look in our spouse’s eyes that reaches the depth of our hearts, our first love. How can we not love God above all else! He who has given all this to us, to be stewards of his love-this love which reaches the very depth of our souls!
This love of the Father brings us closer to all our brothers and sisters, this love that brings us close to Him who created all. This love is our saving help. How could we carry our crosses in life if it weren’t in the faith that God is all and all, That God, through Jesus Christ, is always there to be with us, to give us strength when we are down, when we are fighting an illness, or recovering from surgery, a setback of our very self -worth; a set back when we fail to love ourselves!
Without the cross, we would have no way to the Father’s kingdom. Jesus hung on a cross for us. I think he has big enough shoulders to help us carry our crosses in our lives. The important thing here is that we reach out and ask for His help, to be beside us to give us strength.
In today’s gospel Jesus is instructing his disciples and us on the sacrifices involved and the priorities they and we must embrace in being his messengers of the gospel to the world. He tells us that we must be ready, if need be, to sacrifice the dearest things in life.
The gospel also tresses the profound dignity of even the smallest gesture done in hospitality toward another especially God’s messengers of the gospel, his disciples, which hopefully we all are. To receive a messenger of Jesus is to receive Jesus himself. Again, here we are receiving God through others. I think our parish does a pretty good job at doing this.
So, does God love us? Did he create us out of his love? Listen to this: You are not unwanted, you are chosen. You are not unloved, you were to die for. You are not alone, you are His. How can we not love Him more than anyone, more than anything else! To love God is to call upon him when we are in doubt. To love God is to love all his creation. Give to God your weakness and he will give you his strength.
We are not saved by Christ’s suffering, we are saved by his love for us. It was through Jesus Christ’s suffering that attained his glory and thus opened the gates of heaven for us.
Through our sufferings, through carrying of our daily crosses Jesus will be with us on earth and we will be crowned with him in heaven by the reception of his body and blood in the Eucharist here and now. The road of suffering is a narrow and difficult one. It is a great comfort for us to know that Christ, the innocent and sinless one, has gone down this road before us, and gone down it to the end.
This road is not the same since he travelled it. A bright light aluminates it. And it does not end at Calvary but at Easter. No matter how things look right now, know that God is still in control of our lives if we let him. Stay in peace and believe that He will always be with you in all directions.
In the gospel we hear Jesus send his disciples out in love to be received, welcomed and in that way they will know even more deeply the love that goes with them. They are the new prophets and in our days these prophets continue to knock, enter, pass by, and ask for welcome.
We are not rewarded nor do we win God’s love by doing this or that. We are made ready to receive God’s love, by our being receptive to the “prophetic moments” of each day which Jesus calls our “daily cross”. Answer when the prophet knocks. Love them and love God.
Loving God is so different from loving anything else that as I had to learn to love properly as a teenager, which was very different from loving family, so we learn slowly how to love God by allowing God to be welcomed and made present in all our days.
Jesus says in our gospel today that if we are looking for our own life, we shall lose that life. If we are seeking the life of Jesus, we shall have our own life. It is only in giving up our lives that we are given life. This is one of the great challenges of following Jesus.
The more we deny ourselves, the more life of Jesus we have. Again the strong reminder: when we deny ourselves, we are doing this out of love and not out of ant other motive. If we judge others, then we condemn ourselves. If we seek simply what the Lord asks of us today and every day, we are blessed- over and over and over.
May we seek the face of the lord and respond to His love! May we accept the gifts of the Lord and know that in those gifts there is also hardship. May we die to ourselves in the very best way, but loving +God first and always.