25 February 2016 - law of love

[ Today's Readings ]

‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded
if someone should rise from the dead.’

Jesus, you have risen from the dead. But do you persuade us? Do we dine sumptuously each dear and dress in fine linen but ignore the poor man at our door?

LORD, help us to listen to Moses and the prophets. Help us to be like the man who "delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on his law day and night."

When it comes down to it, your law is calling us to love. We'd rather hear about things which are abstract and spiritual. Love intrudes into our comfortable lives. Love calls us to prefer others to our linen and our feasts.

If we are honest with ourselves our hearts long for the comforts of the rich man.

More tortuous than all else is the human heart,
beyond remedy; who can understand it?

But the comforts of the rich man do not satisfy. Teach us, LORD, where true joy is found.

I, the LORD, alone probe the mind
and test the heart,
To reward everyone according to his ways,
according to the merit of his deeds.

Even your resurrection won't make sense to us if we reject the call to love.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them (see Matthew 5:17).

Rather than setting aside these demands the law makes on us you give us the power to fulfill them.

Jesus brings God's commandments to fulfilment, particularly the commandment of love of neighbour, by interiorizing their demands and by bringing out their fullest meaning. Love of neighbour springs from a loving heart which, precisely because it loves, is ready to live out the loftiest challenges. Jesus shows that the commandments must not be understood as a minimum limit not to be gone beyond, but rather as a path involving a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection, at the heart of which is love

(see Veritatis Splendor 15 by St. John Paul II)

Jesus, we can't ignore the law and the prophets. There is no happiness that way. Nor can we find fulfillment pursuing those laws under our own strength. They can't just be exterior demands based on guilt or duty. They must be nourished by the water of life that you give (see John 4:10). Selfish motives cannot give us the strength to live selflessly. Only your Spirit in us can do so.

He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.