Daily Gospel Reading Reflection - God Imitators

Word On Fire Ministry ^ | 10-25-2020 | Aux. Bishop R. Barron

[MurphsLaw]

THIRTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

MATTHEW 22:34-40

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus names love of God and neighbor when a scholar challenges him to identify the greatest commandment.

Since love (caritas) is what God is, it is also that virtue that conforms us most dramatically to God. Thomas Aquinas says, in eloquently simple language, that caritas is friendship with God. In his great farewell discourse, offered the night before his death, Jesus says to his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends—and in this he opens up a new world.

In any other religion, a human being could be called, vis-à-vis God, a creature, a penitent, an eager supplicant, but only in Christianity could she be called an intimate of God. This is true because in Christ, God has become one of us, thereby establishing a parity beyond our capacity even to imagine.

The participation in what God is is what Aquinas means by caritas, friendship with God. The moral challenge, of course, is to live out the implications of that friendship, listening and speaking to God, obeying the promptings of his voice, opening one’s heart to him, and, above all, loving what he loves—which is to say, everyone and everything.

[MurphsLaw]

Brothers and sisters: You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth not only in Macedonia and in Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. For they themselves openly declare about us what sort of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to await his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.

[Cronos]

Thank you for posting this lovely article