Love God, Love People

10-25-2020Gospel Meditation© LPi

For some reason, it is easier to genuflect in reverence to the presence of Christ in the tabernacle of a church than to genuflect in reverence to the same presence of Christ in another person’s soul. We wrongly believe that God divides himself, placing himself in one place in preference to another. It doesn’t work that way. Love of God and love of neighbor are intimately and inseparably connected because the essence and spark of God’s very presence is in all creation. God’s presence is just as real in the one who is good, as in the one who is bad, and the one who is just, and the one who is unjust.

Our brains get in the way of truly contemplating the awesomeness of this truth. We like to separate things into boxes, the sheep from the goats and the deserving from the undeserving. But, with God there are no distinctions such as this. Our human classifications, subdivisions, and definitions hold no power or have any weight in God’s eyes. Sadly, we relate to God and to each other as if they do.

We cannot be deaf to the world’s pain. It is not about having, hording, accumulating, acquiring, securing, storing, protecting, owning, claiming, or any of the other human terms we use to distinguish mine from yours. We put so much power in these words and that power, even though we may not always realize it, can cause those words and the distinctions they carry to wound and hurt others. We have the whole order of things wrong, but we are so set on preserving this order that we are absolutely afraid to do it any other way.

We go through hoops trying to convince ourselves why the perils of the person seeking a new place to call home are not our perils that we turn our back and justify closing our doors. It makes perfect sense to us. Yet, it makes no sense in terms of our faith. It doesn’t square with any of the words found in Sacred Scripture or in any time-tested teaching of the church.

We have it all reversed. We know that we do because when Jesus speaks about such things and the words of the Old Testament prophets ring out again, we start to feel uncomfortable and anxious. What we do, directly or by omission, to one of the least of these little ones we do to God. It is quite possible that some of what we are doing personally, economically, politically, globally, and even religiously is doing more harm than good. Let’s ponder that a bit.