+ Our readings for Mass today are full to the brim with all kinds of imagery, innuendos, and instructions, being the continuation of last Sunday’s gospel passage of St. Luke’s version of St. Matthew’s great Sermon on the Mount. This last sentence just demonstrates the fullness, amplitude, and comprehensiveness of some very useful and helpful gospel imperatives: which all boils down this week to the Alleluia Verse before the Gospel:
I give you a new commandment (says the
Lord): Love
one another as I have loved you.
In
this one sentence Jesus
summarizes all of what came before him, and what proceeds after him: he provides and gives the foundation and moral
sense that David employed in the first reading when he spares the life of King Saul,
who was chasing after him with 3000 soldiers to kill him (seeing him as a
threat to his Kingship) – David would be later chosen by God to replace Saul as
King. But it was the heart of David that beat with the same love that God
himself had, that will move God to choose David to be king, a man “after his
own heart” – and so we see David’s goodness, kindness, and compassion in full
array even at an early age.
This
can be helpful to us, when, as sometimes happens, we finally get our “enemy-”of-sorts
(if even those we make up in our own heads) into our grasp: sound asleep at our
feet, with the “spear of justice” sitting right close at hand, and we follow
the God-given impulse not to beat the daylights out of them (or even to kill
them), but rather to have mercy on them, to show mercy with them,
and to become mercy for them, in sparing that person’s life, be it
literally or figuratively and symbolically.
In
the second reading St. Paul tells the Corinthians that redemption for them
means a kind of real and authentic incorporation of themselves into Jesus, who
became the Second Adam – thus becoming spiritually generated children of God
who become at the same time “assimilated into God’s mercy, compassion and
forgiveness – just as Jesus always was.
And so,
we need to bear our physical likening to Christ, as he bore ours and then rejoice
that we do indeed have a share in the very mortality that he has come to transform
into his own divinity and likeness, because he loved us and showed us mercy, compassion,
and forgiveness.
In
the gospel passage then, we see St. Luke “sermonizing” with a variety of suggestions,
applications, and instructions on how we are to interact with one another lovingly
from the heart – and not just half-heartedly like the pagans do sometimes. We
are to allow ourselves to be moved to do for others what God has done for us: love
your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray
for those who mistreat you: this is going over and above bare minimums:
Turn the other cheek, give your shirt
and your coat to those who ask for just one thing, give without expecting repayment,
give generously and overabundantly, because you will receive back an amount
based on what you have given, and with the same motivation and willingness: for
the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you!
And
so, all these matters today can be tied in with and bound together with the
reality that LOVE – self-sacrificial outpouring of yourself for the good of
another DOES MAKE THE WORLD GO ROUND – and that BEING FEARFUL and not willing
to go out of your way for others for any number of reasons – MAKES THIS WORLD A
MUCH DARKER, COLDER AND LESS INVITING PLACE than it can and ought to be!
The
Lord is kind and merciful! And so must we
be so, that our joy knows no bounds and that we infect everyone we come into
contact with, with love, hope and peace!
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