Love takes the focus off of fear: 14th Week of the Liturgical Year, July 3-9, 2011

Love takes the focus off of fear
Fourteenth Week of the Liturgical Year, July 3-9, 2011
Genesis, chapters 28-50; Matthew, chapters 9-10

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Most people are trying to make life better for themselves and others. This is a classic definition of love: to want people to “be and become all they can be.” Jesus came that we might “have life and have it to the full.”

The problem is in how we go about it. Do we begin with fear or with love? Fear leads to violence, love to surrender—specifically, the surrender Jesus made when, quailing before his passion and death during his agony in the garden, he prayed to the Father, “Thy will be done.”

Those who turn to violence, whether just the violence of impatient words or the deadly violence of war, euthanasia, abortion or business-for-profit-only, can believe they are motivated by love. They really believe they are making life better for themselves and others by removing what they perceive as an obstacle to happiness. The question, again, is: should we begin with fear of a threat, or with love for those who threaten and are threatened? Should our first focus be on problems or on persons?

Actually, our first focus has to be on the person of Jesus Christ. He is the only Way that leads to Life. We just have to accept his Truth. Jesus summarized the truth of the whole Christian life in less than sixty words by teaching us we only need to pray for five or six things. And by “pray for” he means “set our hearts on,” and “strive for” in action. If we do this, our hearts and our priorities will be conformed to his. And that is what Christianity is all about.

This week the Mass readings invite us to focus on the petition-priority: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is a prayer of surrender to God when his will is difficult to accept—as it was for Jesus when he prayed this in Gethsemane.

God’s most difficult command, which Jesus gave as his “new commandment,” is “Love one another as I have loved you.” This love calls us to keep ministering to others who don’t respond. Or who reject us. To minister to “impossible” cases who are simply “dead” to truth and goodness. Jesus raised the dead in more ways than physical.

Love calls us to dialogue rather than demand; to speak from within a community as an equal rather than from “above” as a ruler; to minister rather than to “manage;” to accept vulnerability as Jesus accepted humiliation from his enemies; to surrender to what we fear rather than seek to escape it: “Thy will be done.” If we think about the meaning of the words from a Christian
perspective: Love makes it possible to die. Fear makes it impossible to live.

It isn't a koan, because it does make sense rationally. But it does invite one to think.