Shown Great Love

Shown Great Love

Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time 2013 C

By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ

I gave you the house of Israel and of Judah.  And if this were not enough, I could count up for you still more.  Why have you spurned the Lord and done evil in his sight?  You have cut down Uriah the Hittite with the sword; you took his wife as your own, and him you killed with the sword of the Ammonites.  Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house.  2 Samuel 12:8b-10a

For through the law I died to the law, that I might live for God.  I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.  Galatians 2:19-20

“Do you see this woman?  When I entered your house, you did not give me water for my feet, but she has bathed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair.  You did not give me a kiss, but she has not ceased kissing my feet since the time I entered.  You did not anoint my head with oil, but she anointed my feet with ointment.  So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven because she has shown great love.  But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”  Luke 7:44-47

Piety

David made some terrible mistakes in his relationship with the Lord and people around him suffered for the dumb things he did when the Lord had given him so much that more could have been expected of him.  Forgiveness helps our piety to grow.   We cannot help but realize that we can never deserve God’s love.  God loves us and loves us all the more when we ask his forgiveness and call him to come to us.  Piety is the miracle of our conscience that allows us to ask forgiveness.  It is God’s unasked love that makes us so aware of our sinfulness.  Piety can be called our openness to the Lord and our willingness to accept forgiveness.

Study

We study Paul to see how we can better live in Christ.  When we accept his dying for our sins, we discover how Christ lives in us.  It is not easy to say “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” When we bring our sinfulness to the forgiveness of the cross, we discover each time we go to the cross how we rise with him.  Christ is the better part of our lives.  We need Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life of who we are.  Christ comes to us with a love that is perfectly expressed in his dying for us on the Cross.  We study how to make a response to his great love.

Action

Action is how we give our lives back to Christ.  We ask the Lord to take our minds and our hearts.  We offer our freedom back to the Lord.  The great gift of Christ is in our discovering how he perfectly understands us in his humanness.  His grace and his love is enough for us.  The invitation to discipleship is lived in how we do all we do in his name.  Each breath of our bodies becomes his when we see even our breathing as prayer.  We breathe in Christ and breathe him out by our love and work for a better world.  We try to do all that we do in his name.  He has forgiven us our sins.  We live his forgiveness by being his love to our world.  We live the perfect self-love by giving our lives for the sake of our neighbors.  Christ’s forgiveness is lived out in our love for one another.