Friday Gospel Recharge: A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 22: 34-40

Friday Gospel Recharge Series

 Friday Gospel Recharge

A Reflection on Matthew 22: 34-40 

(20th Friday in Ordinary Time, Year A of the Liturgical Calendar, 2023)

Living our best by loving God and Neighbour as ourselves

In this Gospel, Jesus teaches us two very important aspects of how to be properly human beings. The first of his teachings is that we ought to be absorbed in loving God above every creature with our mind, body and soul. After this commandment, Jesus then instructs us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. If we do these two things, we are then on the straight and narrow path to live the proper human life.

If you are questioning why Jesus informs us to prioritise the love of God with our total existence as the first principle of life, we should first ponder who is God in relation to us. According to Catholic doctrine, God, whose nature is love, is the creator of all that is confined in space and time, and he created all that there is for us out of love. Because God loves us, and gave us a share in his existence out of his own love, we should return this love that God has for us.

Naturally, we came into the world through the marital act which our parents had joined themselves in however by the grace of God, he allowed for human life to be created through that act which made us. Through the martial act, our parents became co-creators with God, which is love.

How can one show this kind of love towards God? As reflected in Jesus’s example, we ought to be obedient to the will of the Father. Jesus did this by dying for us on the cross. We can emulate this act by observing the law he has written in our own hearts, the Ten Commandments. When observed, we mirror Jesus in our behaviour and attitudes; though we do not make a literal sacrifice with our own life with the shedding of our blood, nevertheless we sacrifice and deny ourselves the temptation of the flesh which constantly wants to rebel against God. Other than observing this law, we can enter into a loving relationship with God through prayer, making that relationship with him a personal and intimate one.

Prayer which makes our relationship personal gives real meaning to how we think speak and act in the world. We consider our actions and ask ourselves in prayer with God if I do this or that, who will be affected by them? While we naturally hurt others with our poor choices - and some of these include cheating our friends and spouses, fornication, stealing, murdering to name a few - we also offend God too by those behaviours because we hurt the ones who God also loves, who happen to be our friends, family, and other colleagues. We offend God when we fail to love ourselves in a healthy manner, which is observed once again in keeping of the law.

Now, Jesus says the second command is like the first: our love for others should be the same love we have for ourselves. This is an important commandment to reflect on. Jesus wants us to share a part of our existence with others, wanting them to have the same quality of life that we would wish for our own selves. In some way this is the same love God has loved us with. When God loves us he does not love us with a love that is separable from himself but of the same love that he has for himself. God knows how to love himself properly and with this proper love he has, he gives to us unconditionally.

It might help to reflect on Jesus’s own sacrifice and how that act resembles his command to love others as we love ourselves. Jesus who is God has for himself the beatific vision, meaning that contained in his own person he shares the triune divine life. This life from Jesus’s point of view is awesome and much more. He sees himself happy and content in God. He wants us to be happy and content too in God. So that we might be happy and content some day with him, he died for us to make this future reality possible. In other words, with the command to love our neighbour as ourselves, Jesus invites us to put into practice how it is to love others the way God loves us. God in the person of Jesus wants us to experience his love for us and we experience this by loving him first completely. From there, once we discover his unconditional love and are affected by it, we should learn that we are made not just for but also to love unconditionally. God in his commandment to love others as ourselves is a call consider laying down our own lives for others so that they might find life in God.

Today, in our Catholic culture, there seems to be an over emphasis on an horizontal love while neglecting our vertical obligation to love. By horizontal I mean man’s love for man, and by vertical man’s love for God. It is good that our brothers and sisters of the Catholic ilk are out there advocating and seeking the basic needs and more for our downtrodden and neglected neighbour, however, when we neglect a healthy love for God, our love for neighbour is seriously diminished. You see, Gods love is unconditional. To experience this kind of love requires our constant attention on God. When we experience this love of God, we are able by God’s grace to make our love unconditional towards others. We give more than what we can or want to give that justice demands; in extension of justice, we show our neighbour mercy. This kind of attitude we read in Jesus’s parable on the workers in the vineyard, where the vineyard owner pays each of his labourers, whether they worked half a day or an hour, they got the same pay. While half a day’s work warrants half a day’s pay and an hours work an hours pay, God is reckless in his giving, providing more than what justice deserves. God not only gives us the grace to love as he loves, but coming to know and experience God and place our trust in him, our faith informs us this is the only kind of love that warrants a gold star.

Too often we make a fuss about people whose needs have been forgotten, and forget to put God in the equation in their neglect. God motivates us to love others since it is he who wants a just world and for people to flourish. This aspect of love is seriously overlooked and it’s most likely because of secular inculturation of every sphere of society.

God gave us these two commandments not for the sake of the law itself but so that we can truly discover who God is and what we were made for. We were made to love God and others and find life in a relationship genuine in love. Ultimately, Jesus gave us this commandment so that through knowing, loving and serving God in this life we can be happy with him in a beatific way, someday, in heaven. As Catholics who are hard bent on justice, we should love God first and learn to love others as God loves us so that our society will have life and more at the heart of its values rather than so much an ideology separated from love.

Friday Gospel Recharge: A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 19: 3-12

 

Friday Gospel Recharge Series

Friday Gospel Recharge

A Reflection on Matthew 19: 3-12 

(19th Friday in Ordinary Time, Year A of the Liturgical Calendar, 2023)

A much longer commitment is what Jesus had intended for us

What Jesus teaches us in this Gospel is that divorce - although prevalent in our culture today and perhaps, in Jesus time - is not something intended in the big scheme of divine things. The text is clear: it was Moses who issued certificates of divorce for those whose hearts were stiff to be reconciled, and not God. In fact, now that God never intended divorce an acceptable practice, he likens it to adultery if the divorcee remarries.

Is this saying too difficult for us to accept? Our modern world who issues one divorce cert. after another would find this intolerable. I speak from personal experience. Family members and friends of my own are remarried. They never seem to consider any advice on reconciling with their sacramental spouses but instead dismiss it, pretending the thought of reconciliation is an impossible game or an inconvenience. Even parents of these people don’t like to hear about it. Their excuse is that the rest of the world is doing it so what’s the problem? A pathetic response in my opinion when these folks profess to carry Jesus in the hearts and on their lips and cross themselves before a holy icon of our Lord. This attitude towards marriage does not align with what Jesus tells us here: if a divorced person marries another, that person commits adultery.

Jesus must have had a reason for preaching this difficult doctrine which is highly regarded by the modern world as intolerable. It’s intolerable because as human beings we want more for ourselves in life and if we live selfishly, we are going to want more of the good things via illicit means which violates God’s commandments. If in our hearts we have More and the means to more is by rejecting God’s boundaries, than hearing this doctrine is hard to accept. However, we must remember that Jesus wants us to have more too just as our hearts desires, even if our means to attaining more of whatever that might be is unacceptable. He says so himself: ‘I’ve come to give you life and to have it to the full’. To have more as Jesus intended it requires us to listen to him and accept his teachings. When we do this, we find a more fulfilling life.

Our faith teaches us that Jesus is God who is one with the Father and that God is love. Whatever God tells us in scripture and whatever he has done for us through others in the scriptures is because he loves us. If God is love and Jesus tells us that divorce and remarriage is tantamount to and is in fact adulterous, we must consider for a moment why this doctrine is spoken from a place of love. Jesus has our best interest at heart. He wants us to flourish and for that to happen he must direct and govern our lives. Divorce is never a clean business. Most of us know this with firsthand experience since we know someone we love who is divorced and perhaps sadly remarried unsacramentally. If they have children, they get caught in the mess of it all too. While it has an emotional toll on both parties it is also ecologically taxing. Think about the extra beds that need manufacturing so that divorced spouses and their displaced children need to sleep on, all those extra household appliances when one would do for a family unit, or the extra houses that need constructing and the space it takes up. Each square meter required to build new homes means one less square meter for sister bee and brother wolf to share and coexist with us. Sensible beings such as non-human animals while are a beautiful sight to behold play a vital part In the ecosystem that allow our existence to flourish.

There are good grounds that one must separate from their spouse especially if they are violent. I am not saying a man or a woman should remain in a household if their life is threatened, that would go against Gospel values but let’s face it not all marriages are abusive and if one is subject to abuse, our Lord tells us that this doesn’t warrant for remarriage as it would mean adultery is committed. His or her option is to isolate from the violent one and seek counselling. 

However, the church does provide a condition for a valid marriage. One who is entering a marital contract require four conditions for its validity, which are free will, consent, have the intention to marry for life, and to be open to children. If I can add a fifth, no impediments such as one of the parties has not been married.  Now if you don’t satisfy these conditions the Church - through the marriage tribunal - provides an opportunity to explore the possibility of an annulment, provided that one or more of the elements of the validity have not been met at the marriage. This process is thorough and can be very slow (up to 5 years because it has to be completely sure that one has legitimate grounds for an annulment and that there has been an impediment from the beginning). In other words, the marriage covenant is a serious business and not broken through annulment lightly. 

On a much deeper level, Jesus preachers against divorce and remarriage because marriage is a sacrament and that marriages should reflect the love the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have for each other. God are three distinct beings united in love. They are never divorced from their love but each wills the good of the other. As a married person you’re ought to reflect this love with your spouse because marriage is a covenant between both God and your spouse.  

As disciples of Jesus, what does this mean to us? It means a number of things but I will propose two things. Firstly, if we are single and are prepared to get married, choose your spouse wisely and discern through prayer with Jesus whether he or she is the appropriate partner and whether you have a vocation to marriage. If you are married and find the commitment a struggle, find a way forward to preserve not because it’s your duty, but because you love God and the one whom you have promised to death do you part. Thirdly, if you have a happy marriage then continue to build on the relationship between your spouse and God and be an example for all who aspire for a lifelong commitment of love through this sacrament.

Amen, praise God.

Friday Gospel Recharge: A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 16: 24-28

Friday Gospel Recharge Series

Friday Gospel Recharge

A Reflection on Matthew 16: 24-28 

(Friday Week 18, Year A of the Liturgical Calendar, 2023)

Challenges of Discipleship in the Modern World

The word disciple comes from the Latin word ‘discipulus’. Its basic meaning is that of discipline. We all know too well what it feels like to be disciplined in a task or skill set. It comes with study, preparation and hard work. Without discipline of some skill, trade, or even the body against its appetite for food, drink and sex then really you haven’t mastered what you had set out to acquire.

In this Gospel passage, Jesus says to his disciples that if they wish to follow after him, then they ought to say no to their own ambitions, aspirations and carry their crosses too. However, not all ambitions are subject to renouncement, since people desire to be religious, priests, married or remain single in the world and these particular lifestyles are good and something which we are all called to consider.  However, what Jesus has in mind here is the denial of our pursuit of worldly things and seek what our Heavenly Father intends for us, which is total obedience to the will of the Father. Total obedience to the Father’s will is what Jesus accomplished with his own life and death on the cross, and total obedience is required to all those who so desire to live to know love and serve their God.

Disciplining oneself to the total will of God requires the discipline of discernment, effort and perseverance. Effort and perseverance are pretty self-explanatory, since every work task requires these two elements to master anything. However, discernment is also important in the part of the discipline of discipleship because we have competing forces here for our soul.  God wants us and the devil wants to conquer us also. To figure out what God wants from us requires discernment therefore because while God informs our hearts that wily bastard seeks to distract us from the data God gives us or distort it with false realities.

God’s will while it is not too demanding on the mind, body and soul, since he asks us to love one another as he has loved us, our weak bodies and societal influences can sway us to direct our wills on ungodly things such as those things which is the opposite of love, which might be to speak uncharitably about others, lie, neglect the need of a neighbour who we are capable of helping, or even lay with our neighbours spouse or any man or woman for that matter outside the covenant of marriage. You see, the influence of the flesh and the world is so enticing we can at times say no to God and say yes to a falsely perceived good, which are some of those things mentioned earlier. We can fall prey to the ungodly for many reasons but one that has been drawn to my attention is that our weak bodies and societal influences inform us that we might just miss out on something good if we constantly direct our attention and will on God’s plan.

Also in this Gospel, Jesus tells us that it’s not what we possess but what we have done that merits eternal life. Even having possession of the whole world will not save man from being judged unfavourably. It’s not all the gold medals nor accolades that wins God’s heart, but our effort in taking the knee and washing the feet of those whom God loves. This point is pertinent because God wants us to be aware that being on top of the world or dominating others is not a condition of discipleship nor something he takes favour in. Discipleship entails something much more than having loads of possessions, it means to have less for ourselves in this life and take up our crosses and follow The way of Calvary and be crucified for Jesus sake. When we bear our crosses, we not only avoid domination of others but instead stand beside our neighbour and relate with them.

Think of the Story of Adam and Eve. It is from Adams rib that the woman is made from. In other words, the woman is neither beneath nor above man but is equal to him. Adam had to lose something apart of himself so that that wonderful creature the woman can also have life and share all that is good about it. The sacrifice of Adams rib for the sake of woman is an indication that from the beginning and in our DNA we were made to be disciples of each other.

Let’s remember too that Jesus who from the beginning was arrayed in majesty humbled himself and became not just a man, but a Nazarene, a nobody, and served others, a hopeful reminder for those who have their hearts set on silver and gold to reconsider their priorities.

So, when the time comes for his second return, Jesus will judge us accordingly to charity and our contribution to building up God’s kingdom on earth. Jesus’s return is a helpful reminder to us that in the presence of God we will be judged, that we ought to lose it all at the time of his second coming which is drawing near.

In summing up, let’s consider our priorities. Is Jesus number or are we attached to worldly pleasures and possessions of all kinds of goods and rarely use them for the benefit of others and the kingdom? The choice is real - our reward for eternity by denying ourselves now or enjoying the pleasures of this world and not nurturing our soul and therefore losing our reward?

Friday Gospel Recharge: A Reflection on the Gospel of Matthew: 13: 54-58

Friday Gospel Recharge Series

Friday Gospel Recharge

A Reflection on Matthew 13: 54-58 

(Friday Week 17, Year A of the Liturgical Calendar, 2023)

Rejection of a commoner: Jesus

According to St Augustine, the greatest act one could do for another is to lead them to the truth. Truth in the usual sense is something that is in accordance with a fact or reality, definition (provided by google). This truth is not what Augustine means to say, but instead, he means God. God in general is truth because all things that is true which entails the good things in life, beautiful things, love and everything that is true proceed from him. As for us, who shouldn't only be lead to the truth and thrive on it, always have a tendency to share it and sometimes, when sharing it, are faced with hostility. You see, truth, while it can be a reality or fact that is positive in nature, can say something negative about someone else. For example, this behaviour or lifestyle is morally questionable, and as a result reconsider your actions and outlook in life. People don't like being told what to do and as a result don't want to hear it, expressing it by dismissing what you have to say or rejecting you all together, known as the cancel culture.

In this week's Gospel, we read that Jesus is faced with some hostility by his own Nazarene kinsmen. If you are attentive to the reading, you will realise that the hostility brought upon him is due to what he knows and the things he said. The nature of Jesus's sayings isn't exactly fire and brimstone, but that his words are rich in wisdom and insightful in the mystery of God. It isn't so much that the people can bare the wisdom he has to share, but the fact of his social status among them: isn't this man a bastard Nazarene? Where and how has this man acquired this knowledge and why are we being addressed by such an insignificant figure like this man?

You might be wondering where in the text does it offends and likens Jesus as an illegitimate son. thanks to scholarship, the fact that Matthew addresses Jesus as a son of a carpenter and not the son of Joseph raises suspicion of Jesus not having proper status nor is worthy of honour. To heighten Jesus’ insignificance and being without distinction among his own, Matthew also names each and every one of Jesus’ step-siblings which stresses the fact that his whole family is well known in the village. So, the narrative tells us then that the people are hearing wonderful things about God but from a commoner who according to custom should know less and ought to think and behaviour like a commoner.

Jesus however addresses the people after their dissatisfaction and apostasy by saying that no prophet is welcomed in his home town. We can say that the people apostasies because the Greek verb for turning their backs conveys something close to the idea of apostasy or the renunciation of faith. It is incredible to think that people would turn away from God therefore, because of individuals who are chosen to represent God and his God’s teaching because they see that individual as insignificant and unworthy of speaking with this authority.

Prophets according to Holy Writ were sometimes subject to violence from the people. A prophet is a messenger of God who often came with a message condemning the people’s wayward behaviour, and so no wonder why they were not welcomed at times. However, these chosen individuals were sometimes ordinary in the eyes of the people such as Moses, and others having high social and religious status such as Jeremiah, a man who first spent his career as a temple priest before his calling as a prophet. We get a general feel then that a professional career as a prophet is not acquired through rigorous learning, having social status nor attaining qualifications to meet the job requirements. Instead, God chooses the person for the task irrespective of his standing in society and equips him with the words required for the job.

Prophets in the Old Testament sense do not exist anymore. With the revelation of God made fully known in the person of Christ as God’s last word, there is no need for further revelation nor a need for prophets acting as the mouth piece of God. Although, God’s message found in scripture is still important to us and to those after us to hear so the urgency of having the word proclaimed remains.

As baptised Catholics we have the duty to proclaim the Word of God. The church states that after baptism we share in the threefold mission of Christ as priest, prophet and king. Like the prophets of old, we are sent by God as his messengers to speak for God by word and deed. Whether we find ourselves capable or not, we are required by virtue of our baptism to say something about Christ and about his teachings we are called to observe. For example, to say Jesus is God is an example of our sharing him with others. Saying there is no salvation outside Christ is an example of sharing teaching of his.

We are still called to be a prophet of own time amongst family and friends, but like Jesus, we face being rejected. If you think you’re an insignificant figure representing Christ and have nothing to offer, Jesus sympathies with you because of his own rejection from his kinsman who saw little of him, though their understanding of who he was, indeed was superficial and lacking true insight of him.

However, we need to stand in the truth of who we are in Christ through our baptism as Jesus saw who he was in God, and take the message of the Gospel among the many who are yet called to also know, love and serve God. We need to continue to preach the Gospel, face rejection from others, because in their eyes our social status does not count.

·         How important is preaching the Gospel to you?

·         How much are you prepared to suffer when you preach it?

·         What strategies will you employ to ensure that God’s word is heard?