Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

A retired rotor from
the Bonneville Dam
on the Columbia River

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102311.cfm

"You shall love the Lord, your God,

with all your heart,

with all your soul,

and with all your mind.

This is the greatest and the first commandment.

The second is like it:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 

The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

These two greatest commandments have not won the attention they deserve in our cultural tradition. Another teaching of Jesus ranks as his Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." That rule, as important as it is, sounds like his second commandment. But it distresses me that his "greatest and first commandment" lacks that general support and popular appeal.

In fact, a secular culture intentionally disregards the command to "love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." Secularity dismisses God as the all-powerful, all-knowing It. And why should we love an it? It may have made the universe; it may have designed it with astonishing cleverness; it may be the source of wonderful beauty; but, in the end, "the proper study of mankind is man," as the poet Alexander Pope said.

I have met self-described Christians who could not bring themselves to say, "I love God." They are willing to love people in general and persons in particular, but they cannot get their minds around this command to love God. They wonder, "Does God really need to be loved? Is it possible to love God? I might be 'grateful' to God in a general sort of way, as in Thanksgiving Day, but why would I kneel down and say, "O God, I love you?"

In his own day, Jesus might have been flabbergasted by such a question. Coming out of his Jewish tradition, he knew that God has always loved his people and has always demanded their love in return. Even Jesus' opponents could not question that traditional doctrine. But today this command is often overlooked and dismissed.

Christians can begin their contemplation of God at any point but as a Franciscan I always start with Jesus. I see him born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger and I love that baby. He certainly needs and deserves all the protection, care and attention I can give him. When my family of two parents and ten children invaded a relative's home, my Dad often introduced the newest baby with, "Here comes the Boss." Our lives were oriented around the needs of the least among us: "Don't slam the door, don't play so loud, don't make so much noise -- you'll wake the baby!" The first to eat whenever he or she was hungry was the baby. The rest of us ate on schedule.

So when I hear that God was born in Bethlehem, wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger and spirited into Egypt to save him from King Herod, my heart melts with love for him.

When I see the hardships he endured and the opposition he encountered, and when I hear his anguished prayer in Gethsemane I pray, "God, have mercy on him." When I follow him to Calvary and see him hanged on a cross; and when I realize he did not have to do this but chose to do it for my sake, of course I love him. Who would be so hard-hearted as not to love this God with all your heart and soul and mind?
Our Father Saint Francis melted before the image of a cross. Thomas of Celano writes of his first call before the San Damiano crucifix:

From then on compassion for the crucified one was imprinted in his holy soul and, one may devoutly suspect, the stigmata of the holy passion were deeply imprinted in his heart, though not yet in his flesh.

After that Saint Francis designed the habit of our Order in the shape of a cross, which we put on daily. Of that moment when he received the stigmata, Celano writes:

He rejoiced greatly in the benign and gracious expression with which he saw himself regarded by the seraph, whose beauty was indescribable; yet he was alarmed by the fact that the seraph was affixed to the cross and was suffering terribly.

If Saint Francis was initially inspired and elated by the notion of Jesus' poverty, he was overtaken by the vision of Jesus' suffering. There he found his remorse for sin, his vocation and identity, his greatest sorrow and his deepest ecstasy. It was the vision of Jesus as adorable and lovable which made Francis the most influential man of the second millennium, and inspires the Church to this day.

What separates us from the secular culture around us and makes us "holy as the Lord your God is holy" is our readiness to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.