Go and Do Likewise
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2013 C
By
Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ
Moses
said to the people: “If only you would heed the voice of the LORD, your
God, and keep his commandments and statutes that are written in
this book of the law, when you return to the LORD, your God, with
all your heart and all your soul. Deuteronomy 30:10-12
He is the head of the body,
the church. He is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness* was pleased to
dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the
blood of his cross. Colossians 1:18-20b
Which
of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”
Luke 10:36
Piety allows us to reach beyond our comfort zone to
touch the broken bodies of the poor and the needy. We need the hands of Christ to touch bodies
wounded by pain and suffering. When we
handle the suffering bodies of the abandoned, we touch the suffering body of
Christ. His suffering is all the
brokenness of the people of God. He sees
a world created through himself by the father.
It is Christ calling when we see our hearts noticing the sufferings of
our neighbor. Every time we pass by the
suffering one, we pass by Christ.
Study
We study ourselves to discover how we are repulsed by
our human nature in our desire to help our downtrodden neighbor. The perfect love is to love the neighbor as
ourselves. The perfect love allows us to
reach out to Christ in all those we do not have sufficient courage or the faith
to help. We notice a lot more of our
hurting world than we do something about.
God gives all of himself to his Son.
The son from the cross images the marvelous gift of the father by giving
all of himself for us. When we are
unresponsive to the call on our hearts to do something for another, it is the
voice of our sinful nature we are listening to: it does not want its comfort
disturbed. We are given many chances to
do something for the poor. We know that
we will always have the poor with us. What
we do is a drop in the bucket of what is needed. Our conscience lets us know how much of the
call we have missed. The call of the Lord on our hearts does not go
away. Years go by and we cannot help but
remember what the Lord wanted us to do. Our
hearts only rest when they rest in the Lord.
Action
I am convinced that what I do for the least person of
my life is a good measure of how much I love Christ. I look at what I do for the people in life I
most care about and wonder if that is also a true measure? If I try to do for the least people of my life
what I would do for my family, I know that Christ is truly loved in my life. People are the reality check of how much I
love Christ. If no one can tell whom I
most love in life, than I know I deeply love Christ. Christ sets the standard of caring. He tells us that as the father has loved him,
he has loved us. He asks us to love one
another even as we have been loved by him.
He died for the good and the bad alike.
“No greater love has anyone than to give their live for another.” If we
are offering all of ourselves to each person who comes our way, it is thus true
we love as Christ would have us love. The
Commandments are also a reality check. They
are the perfect statement of what genuine love means. If we
did not know the commandments and wanted to be happy, we would have to invent
them. They are written on our hearts as
the to-do of a happy life. The commandments
lived make out of our lives true love.
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