February 23
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
“The Lord is kind and merciful.”
Readings
Reflection
One of the factors in our lives that leads us to both faith and positive relations with one another is the guidance we get from God if we choose to follow it. Sadly, we do not always act on His suggestions. When Jesus tells us that we should love our neighbors, we tend to get hung up on who our neighbor might be and how we might show love for him or her. Love is really not complicated, but we tend to make things more difficult than they need to be in our sinful ways. Our readings today show us some different ways that love can play out in our lives.
David acted on God’s guidance at a critical time. He certainly had his struggles in following God’s word, being guilty of adultery and even murder. However, even though he had his differences with King Saul, he showed a great deal of love and restraint when he had the opportunity to kill him. In the second reading from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he writes to his brothers and sisters about our relationship to Jesus Christ, the life-giving heavenly spirit, “the last Adam,” who is of both heaven and earth. Paul discusses our earthly nature as creatures formed from the dust of earth, as the first Adam was. He tells us that Jesus, the “last Adam” is both earthly and heavenly. He triumphed over earthly death and nothingness by bringing to us the possibility of eternal life. Paul points out that “we have borne the image of the earthly one, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.” Through Jesus’ birth and life as a human and his spiritual life-giving, heavenly nature, we are his brothers and sisters through baptism in Christ.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus takes the love of neighbor to the next level when he suggests that we should love our enemies. Even more, we should go out of our way to treat those people in a better way even than those we love. This is an important distinction because we find it easy to do good things for those we love, and hard to do for those we dislike. It is a hard thing to do, but the rewards are great.
Peace to all, (even my enemies!)
Deacon Dare
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