Put First Things First
Twenty-Seventh Week of Year II Friday October 7, 2016
The Responsorial Psalm focuses us on God’s spirit: “The Lord will remember his covenant forever” (Psalm 111).
In
Galatians 3: 7-14 Paul says we are
saved by faith, not by morality. Faith is knowing
God by sharing in God’s own knowledge of himself. “This is eternal life,
that they may know you, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”1 Jesus came that we might
have “life to the full” by knowing the Father’s “name”; that is, his true
spirit.2 To keep all of God’s rules without seeking intimate
knowledge of his heart is not to be Christian — or fully human: we were created to “know, love and serve God.”
If we truly know God we will love him. If we love him we will keep his
commandments.3 But knowing and loving God are both the source and
the goal of keeping his law.
Paul
calls us “stewards of God’s mysteries,” and Peter “stewards of the manifold
grace of God.”4 As “trustworthy” stewards we need to act against the
“Pharisee party” in the Church who, as in the time of Jesus and of Paul, would
focus us more on keeping the rules than on seeking intimate, affective
knowledge of the mind and heart of God.
In
Luke 11: 15-26 Jesus answers those
who were determined to find fault with him, “Whoever is not with me is against
me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Jesus is the touchstone.
Christians
divide up as “conservatives” and “liberals,” or as “Catholics” and
“Protestants,” and fight over doctrines, rules and even devotional observances.
Some of these are important. But the first question we should ask ourselves and
(only after that) others, is: “What is our relationship with Jesus? How do we
experience him? How do we pray?” If we want to fight for orthodoxy as faithful
stewards of Jesus, we should fight first to keep first things first. What comes
first is knowing Jesus. And the first
sign that we know him is our love for one another.5
Before
we start to argue religion with another we should stop and pray together,
getting in touch with the way we both feel about Jesus, and how we experience
him. Then we may well find either that one or both of us is not in touch with
Jesus, or that we both are and our disagreements are not the obstacle to union
of heart that we thought they were.
The
“fruit of the Spirit” is love, joy and peace.6 If we lose these in defending our
religion, it is not the religion of
Jesus we are defending. We are not being faithful “stewards of the
manifold grace of God.”
1John 17:3. And see Matthew
11:27. 2John 10:10; 17: 6, 26. 3John 14: 15, 23. 41Corinthians 4:1-2; 1Peter
4:10. 51John 2: 10-11;
3:10-16; 4: 7-21. 6Galatians 5:22; Ephesians
4:3.
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