Crazy Love

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Today’s Gospel represents perhaps the most important teaching of Jesus, inasmuch as it sums up all the others. Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. Loving God means seeking union with Him in prayer and the sacraments, and obeying His will like a faithful child; loving neighbor means passionately seeking others’ welfare, even though they are imperfect sinners.

And loving neighbor includes doggedly pursuing the welfare of the least fortunate, those who are suffering want, as the first reading tells us. Too often we Christians forget that looking after the needy is not an optional tack-on to our faith, but rather is a core demand of Him who commands us to love our neighbor as ourself.

These messages of love, very difficult to follow because the require deep faith on the one hand and sacrificial charity on the other, are the same messages that St. Paul tirelessly preached to the gentiles in city after city.

Despite his unconquerable faith and hope, St. Paul must have felt discouragement at times. Was this thing ever really going to take off? For Christianity, so new and vulnerable in the hearts of the communities he founded, to survive when he was gone must have seemed like it would require a massive miracle.

But then we see accounts like that found in today’s second reading, where Paul congratulations the Thessalonians not only for keeping the faith, but ultimately spreading it just as he did, with conviction and passion. Moments like this must have really bolstered Paul’s hope.

Sometimes it feels like we’re the only ones crazy enough to embrace unconditionally Jesus’ message. As such, we feel impotent to pass it on to others. When spreading Christ’s message to others, we have to remember that our words are not the protagonist of conversion, but rather nothing more than a catalyst–the grace of Christ working directly in the human heart is the only protagonist of conversion, salvation, and sanctification.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to make you a catalyst of His redemption. Tell Him you give Him your whole day and your whole life and, even while mindful of your sins, ask Him to take that gift and use it to extend in other souls the same sort of experience of Him and conviction that He has given to you.

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