Wednesday September 18, 2024

Believing in God and loving Him without also loving all whom He loves is an insufficient faith.

Good News Reflection for:

Wednesday of the 24th Week of Ordinary Time
September 18, 2024

Today’s Prayer:

Lord: Do not let my prejudices prevent me from doing good to others. May my mind and my heart always be alert to serve. Amen.

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Today’s Readings:

1 Corinthians 12:31–13:13
Psalm 33:2-5,12,22
Luke 7:31-35
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091824.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-september-18-2024

Love never fails

To be a Christian is to, as St. Paul says in today’s first reading, “strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts.” And the greatest, he says, is excellence in love. Whatever we do without love is pointless.

Faith without love is not real faith. Why? Because God is love, and whatever we do without him is pointless. Believing in him and loving him without also loving all whom he loves (which is everybody, no matter how bad of a jerk they are) is an insufficient faith.

How well we love is measured by how much we care about the people who make us unhappy — those who reject us, hurt our feelings, or give us reasons to fear them, or those who put obstacles in our spiritual walk or oppose us in other ways. (Hey, there’s no one who is easy to love all the time.) And yet we care about them. Right?

To be a mature Christian, we have to put aside the childish ways that Paul speaks of. How do children handle bullies? They run away in fear. Or they withdraw into a depression and hide in fantasy worlds. Or they complain about how cruelly they were treated, bad-mouthing the bully every chance they get. Or they find ways to retaliate and inflict revenge.

How do mature Christians handle bullies? We run to God for the healing of our wounds and the soothing of our aches. We learn from his Word how to righteously protect our hearts without isolating ourselves. And we find ways to love others in the very moments when they are behaving as enemies, even uniting ourselves to Jesus on the cross when it’s time for that. (Remember, sometimes Jesus walked away.)

To refuse to love bullies until they treat us nicely is to break away from our union with God. Paul lists some of the ways that we do this: impatience, unkind behaviors, jealousy, pride and pomposity, making ourselves seem better than others, rudeness, insisting on our own way, being quick-tempered, brooding over how we’ve been hurt, rejoicing when something bad happens to those who were bad to us, refusing to bear all things including unjust treatment, rejecting what the Bible and Church teachings say about unconditional love, forgetting to hope for Christ’s victory, and quitting when our love for others does not produce the results we want.

Wow! What a list! It resonates with our lives all too much. Looks like it’s time to go back to the Sacrament of Reconciliation or to Mass where the Rite of Penance restores us to union with God and to each other.

Love never fails to continue loving. When we walk with Jesus all the way through the valley of sorrow and hurt, we walk with love, bringing Jesus with us. Even when others fail to be converted by Christ’s presence in us, his love never fails to heal us and increase in us his own holiness.

To see more about this topic, read our WordByte “Standing Strong to Lift Up the Truth” @ wordbytes.org/victory/lift-up-the-truth/.

© by Terry A. Modica, Good News Ministries

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