Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We are to love God and love our neighbor. Yet we use this word love in so many different ways. If we are to understand what the Lord commands, then we have to understand what real love looks like. And our truest teacher is God himself. So let us look at how God loves.

He created us in paradise and gave us a single command. We broke it. Yet even when he cast us out of that earthly paradise, he did not abandon our first parents. He gave them a promise: he would restore us and raise us up.

Then things only grew worse. The world became so consumed by wickedness that Genesis describes God as regretting our creation. Yet even when he sent the flood, he did not destroy us all. Because of his love, he preserved a remnant. He gave humanity another chance and promised never again to bring such destruction by a flood.

Then he called together a people: the children of Abraham, the nation of Israel. However we might describe their history, faithful would hardly be the word we would choose. They built idols. They murdered the innocent. They committed adultery. Time and again, by their choices, they rejected God. But God did not abandon them. He remained faithful because he loved them.

And then, in the fullness of time, he sent his Son. After all the rejected prophets, after all the sin, God gave the world his own Son.

We arrested him. We tortured him and spat upon him. We nailed him to a cross. And he died.

But there is something about that cross that we so often miss. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, is the one in whom and through whom the whole world was made. The tree that became the wood of the cross is his creation. He is the creator of the nails. He is the creator of the very people who killed him.

And yet, he loved us. He loved us enough to die for us. He loved us enough even to create the very instruments of his torture and death.

There, upon the cross, he redeems us. He builds the bridge from our fallen world into eternity and offers every single one of us salvation: eternal life in his presence. Hanging upon the cross, he thinks of us. He loves us.

He loves the greatest of the saints and the most wicked of sinners. He loves those who will accept his offer. He loves even those who will look at that love and say they want no part in it. He loves because it is his very nature.

That is love. Whatever else we call love is either a pale shadow of God’s love, or it is false.

And this is the love we are called to imitate: the love revealed supremely in the sacrifice of Christ. With that love, we are to love God. With that love, we are to love our neighbor. We cannot choose one commandment and refuse the other.

No one can love God and hate his brother. Saint John tells us plainly that whoever claims to love God but hates his brother is a liar. And liars will have no place in the kingdom of God.

These are the two great commandments from which all the other laws flow. If we are truly to claim to be Christians, then we must learn to love. Our love must draw no distinction between saint and sinner, between those we judge worthy of our love and those we judge unworthy.

We must learn to love without seeking anything in return. To love simply for the sake of loving, because our very nature has been recreated to be like God’s. The love revealed in Christ must become the love that shapes our lives.

This is the Christian life. This is the fundamental choice before us. We either learn to love as God has revealed love in Jesus Christ, or we reject him. And upon that decision hinges our eternity.