17th Sunday after Pentecost 9.10.11 God loved us first
We are told to love God and then to love Neighbour. These are both difficult commands in different ways.
Loving God is easy insofar as God is loveable, being perfect in every way. But difficult in that God is invisible, intangible, infinitely superior to us. He can seem remote from us, and it is hard to love someone remote.
Loving Neighbour is the reverse problem. He is visible enough, but not so perfect! With regard to neighbours it is their imperfections that make them hard to love. We are not drawn to people who annoy us in any way.
So both these commands are challenging. Yet they are made a lot easier when we realize that God has loved us first.
In telling us to love Him and others He is really just saying: receive My love, and reflect it back to Me and to others.
So we go back one stage and now the task is to receive the love of God. This is a lot easier, but even this can be tricky.
To receive the love of God we just have to recognize His goodness at work in the world, and in our lives. To realize that every good thing we have is from Him and by His gracious will.
We are inclined to resent God when things go wrong, but we really should be thanking Him that there are any ‘things’ in the first place.
What goes wrong is just what has been right undergoing some distortion due to human sin, but the basic goodness of the world is still perceptible and retrievable.
God has loved us first. If we can only realize that and imprint it on our memory we will then have sufficient motivation to love (thank, praise) Him in return and we will even have enough goodwill left over to extend to our neighbours.
When we are grumpy with others it is a sure sign that we are not sufficiently grounded in the love of God. We have forgotten for the present how lucky we are to be alive, how everything about our world is pure grace from God (grace as in gratuitous).
This much we can say just for Creation. If we consider Salvation that is one better still. God has not only made us but saved us. He is willing to forgive our sins when in justice He would be entitled to obliterate us many times over.
This also proves His love. For God so loved the world...
That we might have eternal life, better than life here, in a place more beautiful than here.
If we allow these truths to sink in we will never complain again about anything.
To love God we simply have to reflect something of what He has given us. In the Mass, for example, we offer Him the sacrifice which He has provided for us. It is not much effort on our part; we just have to let ourselves be carried.
To love Neighbour we simply have to remember how well we have been treated by God and offer the same sort of generosity to others. Like the servant who had been forgiven a large debt should have forgiven the other servant a much smaller debt.
The grievances we find with others are so small compared with how much we have offended God.
So we are brought back to humility and gratitude.
We cannot begrudge some small return on all that has been lavished on us.
Many think these commands impossible. We love only those who love us, they say.
But if we give God enough room in our busy schedules to think about what He has done we will grow in love for Him and this will in turn put us in a much more patient mood with others, even the most difficult.
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