God Is Love. That Is What We Should Be.

God Is Love. That Is What We Should Be.

Thursday: Ninth week of the Year:  June 2, 2016

Mark 12:28-34. Year I: Tobit 6:11 to 8:7; Psalm 128:1-5; 
Year II: 2Timothy 2:8-15; Psalm 25:4-14.

The last question Mark tells us Jesus is asked before his passion may have been sincere rather than hostile. At least the questioner responds to Jesus’ answer, which the Pharisees never do. And Jesus tells him “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

The question sets up a great conclusion to Jesus’ teaching. A scribe asks him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” He may have been thinking in terms of the first in a series, but Jesus isn’t. Just as God is not the first and highest in a series of gods, but the One and All, transcendentally above everything created, so there is no graded series of responses we can make to God, one higher or better than the other. To the One God there is only one acceptable response, and Jesus declares it: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

This is just about the only moral teaching Jesus gives in Mark. Jesus really did not make any “rules” as we understand rules. His most radical demands — to “sell all,” lose life in order to find it, reject power and prestige — are simply the Great Commandment translated into practical choices. In his teaching on divorce, for example, he is just matching the ideal of monogamous marriage to “the image of a monotheistic God.” That is Benedict XVI’s insight: “Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people... God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love” (God Is Love, no. 11, 2005).

Saint John Paul II says Christ’s invitation  “Come, follow me” is “the new, specific form” of living out the Great Commandment that gives it a human “how.” And the invitation, “Go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor” simply “brings out the full meaning of the commandment of love for neighbor” (The Splendor of Truth, nos. 18-21; see Monday, Week 8).

He is saying that Jesus’ “second” commandment is simple: all we have and are should be at the service of others, just as “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus “broke” the law by touching lepers, eating with sinners and healing on the Sabbath to show that we misunderstand God’s laws unless we see their goal as helping people. Jesus kept the law by putting all he had—property, time, even his life—at the service of others. His “new commandment” of neighborly love is “to love one another just as I have loved you” (John 13:34).

That is the Good News about morality. It is rooted in the mystery of sharing in the life of Christ. By dying and rising with him in Baptism.  

Initiative: Give God’s life: Simplify your life. Just focus on loving God and others in all you do.

The “Sticking Point” of Faith

The “Sticking Point” of Faith

Monday: Seventh week of the Year: May 16, 2016

(Begin Ordinary Time)

The reflections on Mark’s Gospel are continued from the Sixth Week. See the previous reflections for the time after Christmas, Weeks 1-6 of Ordinary Time.

Mark 9:14-29. Year I: Sirach 1:1-10; Psalm 93:1-5; Year II: James 3:13-18; Psalm 19:8-15.

When they came down the mountain after the Transfiguration, the disciples got a shock. A man ran up and said, “Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a demon. I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.”

Jesus had given the disciples power to heal and cast out demons (3:15). But they had failed! This put a strain on the disciples’ faith. The magic wasn’t working anymore!

Then Jesus “lost it”: “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring the boy to me!”

The father did, saying, “If you can do anything… help us.”

Jesus didn’t like that. “What do you mean, ‘If you can…?’ Everything is possible for anyone who has faith.”

The father answered for us all: “I do have faith; help my lack of faith.” And Jesus cast out the demon.

Now that Jesus is preaching a tougher Gospel, Mark is showing us a tougher kind of demon. To believe in accepting the cross instead of taking up the sword requires more than ordinary faith. Its absence through most centuries of Christianity explains why Jesus’ disciples in the Church have not been able to exorcise society of the demons of violence and war, with all that precedes and follows them. We do have faith. But the world is still suffering from our lack of faith. We do, in fact, choose to save our lives in this world rather than lose them. We will kill others — even and especially if we think they are so evil we might be sending them to hell — rather than let them send us to heaven. We are not willing to respond to evil with love.

We will defend our “American way of life” to the death (doing our best, of course, to assure it will be others’ death rather than our own), rather than accept the yoke (that is, the cross) of domination by another nation or ideology. Don’t most Christians take this for granted?

And parents keep coming to the Church, saying, “I brought my children to Mass, to religious instruction, and asked you to protect them from the demons of our culture — from loss of faith, and from the peer pressure that often ‘casts them into fire and water’ — and you could not.”

True. A Church of mediocre disciples, whether clergy or laity — or of parents — who compromise with the culture, cannot save people from the demons of the culture itself. For this there is no remedy but to turn to God for help, acknowledging our weakness: “This kind can only be driven out by prayer.” And metanoia.

Initiative: Give God’s life: Go to the roots. Re-examine the basic mystery of Baptism and Mass.