Do you love God?
Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) Lectionary: 152
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/103121.cfm
Do you love God?
I often preach about the importance of loving God and loving our neighbor. Most of the time it is more about loving our neighbor. I plan to keep doing that. We’ve got to get this right. We need to love our neighbor.
But, today, I want to get right to the very beginning.
Do you love God? Do you really?
Sometimes it is difficult for us to love God. We know that God is good and worthy of all our love, but we still find it difficult to love God. The reason it is difficult to love God is that we do not understand God. If we did, then of course we could not help but love God.
The Torah commands only two prayers: the first is the Shema, and the other is a prayer of thanks after a meal. The Shema is recited morning and night every day. It is the prayer Jesus quotes in response to the question “what is the greatest commandment?”
The commandments of God are good, and for our good. If God’s people were commanded to offer this prayer twice a day, and Jesus quotes it, then perhaps it would be good for us to be a little familiar with the prayer. Perhaps it will even help us to understand and to love God a little better.
I will paraphrase the prayer:
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And it shall be that these words that I command you today shall be in your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children and you shall speak of them when you sit at home and when you walk along the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
And it shall come to pass if you surely listen to my commandments that I command you today to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul… [then I will bless you].
Beware, lest your heart be deceived and you turn and serve other gods and worship them or the anger of the Lord will blaze against you and he will close the heavens…
The prayer begins Shema Yisra’el – Hear, Israel. Do we listen to God? This is where it begins – listening to God. If we do not listen to God, we cannot know God, and we cannot love God. And how do we listen? We listen by paying attention in Mass, by reading or listening to the scriptures, and by being quiet in God’s presence.
If we do not listen to God we cannot know God.
If we do not know God then we either love and worship an image of God we have created – an idol, or we are hating and refusing to worship a false image of God that we have created in our own minds. These are terrible alternatives. The Lord is our one and only God. God is not one of a pantheon, though certainly there are lesser spirits both good and evil. God is God, and there is no other. My thoughts are not God’s thoughts. Your thoughts are not God’s thoughts. Only God is God. To worship a false image we create or to hate God out of a misunderstanding of God’s person and God’s will has terrible and eternal consequences: a long purgatory at the best, and eternal damnation at the worst.
“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”
Ven Fulton Sheen
That is true of God’s Church, and it is true of God. People reject the teachings of the Church because they reject the Church herself. They reject the church either because they believe lies, or because they blame the holy Church for the deeds of sinful men. Mostly, they reject the Church because they do not know and understand God. As a result, they self-righteously proclaim that they are above the Church and her teachings, and make themselves even above God, though they do not realize they have done so. They create an image of a God who might say the things they want to hear, and worship that idol instead of the true and living God. Evil spirits rejoice, and even offer signs and wonders. And souls perish. Souls of people God loves perish. Souls of people we love perish.
So, what is the remedy? What is the remedy for those in our world, our community, and even our family who hate God or the Church, or perhaps for those who simply fail to love God and the Church?
“And it shall be that these words that I command you today shall be in your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children and you shall speak of them when you sit at home and when you walk along the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”
This is the remedy. Has God spoken to you? Tell your children and your co-workers and your family. Did your grandmother tell a story of a time God helped her or spoke to her? Tell your children and your co-workers and your friends and your family. Has God been kind to you? Share that good news. Have you experienced forgiveness? Share it with others. Instead of chisme, share the good news of the Gospel in your life.
Do you find that perhaps you do not love God as well as you should? It is certainly because you do not know God as you should. Seek God out in the scriptures, in the mass, in confession, in prayer, and in adoration. Then, when you find God, share what you have found. When God whispers in secret, shout it on the rooftops. It will strengthen your faith, your hope, and your love, and it may save the very soul of someone you love from an eternity in Hell, or a very long and difficult Purgatory.
Speaking of eternity… Tonight is Halloween, All Hallows Eve. Tomorrow we have the solemnity and holy day of obligation celebrating all the Saints in heaven. If it is possible, we should come to mass, and we should not work.
Tuesday is the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed – All Souls. It begins a month of prayer for the faithful departed. This November, love your neighbors by sharing God’s goodness with them, and by praying for both the living and the dead. We begin that even today, when we bless the graves at four in the afternoon. Pray to the God who is not bound by time that those who might otherwise have been lost receive the grace to turn to God in their last moments. Pray to God for the souls of the faithful departed who knew and loved God imperfectly, that they may at last enter the courts of heaven where the light of Christ shines perpetually.
