FINDING LIFE BY ENCOUNTERING GOD IN NEIGHBOR AND SELF

20160710 FINDING LIFE BY ENCOUNTERING GOD IN NEIGHBOR AND SELF

First reading

Deuteronomy 30:10-14 ©

Moses said to the people: ‘Obey the voice of the Lord your God, keeping those commandments and laws of his that are written in the Book of this Law, and you shall return to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.

  ‘For this Law that I enjoin on you today is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, so that you need to wonder, “Who will go up to heaven for us and bring it down to us, so that we may hear it and keep it?” Nor is it beyond the seas, so that you need to wonder, “Who will cross the seas for us and bring it back to us, so that we may hear it and keep it?” No, the Word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart for your observance.’

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 68:14,17,30-31,33-34,36-37 ©

Seek the Lord, you who are poor, and your hearts will revive

This is my prayer to you,

  my prayer for your favour.

In your great love, answer me, O God,

  with your help that never fails:

Lord, answer, for your love is kind;

  in your compassion, turn towards me.

Seek the Lord, you who are poor, and your hearts will revive

As for me in my poverty and pain

  let your help, O God, lift me up.

I will praise God’s name with a song;

  I will glorify him with thanksgiving.

Seek the Lord, you who are poor, and your hearts will revive

The poor when they see it will be glad

  and God-seeking hearts will revive;

for the Lord listens to the needy

  and does not spurn his servants in their chains.

Seek the Lord, you who are poor, and your hearts will revive

For God will bring help to Zion

  and rebuild the cities of Judah

  and men shall dwell there in possession.

The sons of his servants shall inherit it;

  those who love his name shall dwell there.

Seek the Lord, you who are poor, and your hearts will revive

Second reading

Colossians 1:15-20 ©

Christ Jesus is the image of the unseen God

and the first-born of all creation,

for in him were created

all things in heaven and on earth:

everything visible and everything invisible,

Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers –

all things were created through him and for him.

Before anything was created, he existed,

and he holds all things in unity.

Now the Church is his body,

he is its head.

As he is the Beginning,

he was first to be born from the dead,

so that he should be first in every way;

because God wanted all perfection

to be found in him

and all things to be reconciled through him and for him,

everything in heaven and everything on earth,

when he made peace

by his death on the cross.

Gospel Acclamation

Jn10:27

Alleluia, alleluia!

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice,

says the Lord,

I know them and they follow me.

Alleluia!

Or	cf.Jn6:63,68

Alleluia, alleluia!

Your words are spirit, Lord, and they are life;

you have the message of eternal life.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Luke 10:25-37 ©

There was a lawyer who, to disconcert Jesus, stood up and said to him, ‘Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? What do you read there?’ He replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ ‘You have answered right,’ said Jesus ‘do this and life is yours.’

  But the man was anxious to justify himself and said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of brigands; they took all he had, beat him and then made off, leaving him half dead. Now a priest happened to be travelling down the same road, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite who came to the place saw him, and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan traveller who came upon him was moved with compassion when he saw him. He went up and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He then lifted him on to his own mount, carried him to the inn and looked after him. Next day, he took out two denarii and handed them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said “and on my way back I will make good any extra expense you have.” Which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbour to the man who fell into the brigands‘ hands?’ ‘The one who took pity on him’ he replied. Jesus said to him, ‘Go, and do the same yourself.’

FINDING LIFE BY ENCOUNTERING GOD IN NEIGHBOR AND SELF

SCRIPTURE READINGS: [ DT 30:10-14; COL 1:15-20; LK 10:25-37  ]

“Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  In seeking for eternal life, he is seeking for the life of God, a share in God’s life.   So, what must we do in order to have a share in the life of God?

The first thing we need to do, the first reading exhorts us, is that we must return to the Lord our God with all our heart and soul.  Why is this so?  Because only God who is eternal life can give us this kind of life!   If there is no life in us, it is because we are far from Him.  Indeed, the stark reality today is that many people are finding God very far from them and are losing faith in Him.  This is more so especially when they meet crises in life.  When we are beset with misfortunes, how can there be God when He does not seem to care?  We are just like the wounded man on the roadside, abandoned, robbed of life.  So a person who has no life cannot see God.  As it is often said, we cannot preach God to a hungry man.  Indeed, atheism is the result of helplessness in the face of innocent and apparently meaningless sufferings.  It is not a theoretical problem but an existential and personal problem.  In the face of suffering, we fall into despair, and give up on life and therefore on God as well.

However, it is equally true to say that the real reason why we give up on life in the face of sufferings is because we have given up on God.  It is because we are just the like Israelites who often wandered far away from God and did not listen to His voice nor obey His commandments and as a result brought disasters upon themselves.  Jesus reiterates this in the gospel when He said, we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength.  Without God, we will not only be unable to live our lives meaningfully but we will not live with wisdom and love.   Not the world’s riches and glory can make us happy.

Consequently, we are in a conundrum.  In the first place, we said that we have no life because we cannot find God.  But in denying God, then there is no way for us to find life either.  Is there a way out?  Whatever it is, the fundamental point remains that eternal life is synonymous with God.  To find true life is to find God.  Conversely in finding God, we always find life.  We can begin from one or the other, but both will meet since to meet God is to meet man and if we truly meet man, we will meet God too.  But we must begin somewhere and not sit around doing nothing, languishing in our predicament.  Where then do we begin?

For most of us, we should begin by finding God in life or else God seems too ethereal and abstract to us.   Why is this so?  Because God is found in creation and most of all in our fellow human beings!  But how can this be so?  Moses said to the people, “the Word is very near to you.”  The question is how near?  So near, Moses said, “it is in your mouth and in your heart!”   What Moses prophesied is fulfilled in Jesus who is truly the Word made flesh.  He is the New Law and the New Covenant.  Jesus is the compassion of God in person.  He is love and compassion incarnated.  In Jesus, the Law of the Old Testament written in words and with ink is now written in the flesh and in the Spirit.   Thus, St Paul tells us that “Christ Jesus, is the image of the invisible God and the first born of all creation; for in him were created, all things in heaven and on earth.”  In other words, by His incarnation Jesus enjoins humanity to Himself; and especially at the resurrection, we become members of His body since He has identified Himself with us by being the first-born from the dead.

The implication therefore is that we are all by virtue of our humanity inserted in creation, and we are all the image and presence of God to each other.  Every one of us has the capacity and potential to mediate the presence, the life and love of God.  Yes, we are called to make God present to each other so that we can encounter God and in encountering Him, we experience life.  In this way, we will share the mission of Jesus who came to reconcile everything on heaven and on earth, man with man; and man with God.

The corollary to this is that if we were to find God today, we must therefore find him in a special way in our neighbors.  But who are our neighbors?  This precisely is the question that the lawyer asked.  Of course, to begin with, it is relatively easy to find God in those who love us.  But we would be certainly short-changing ourselves if we only find God in those who love us.  This is because the focus is not on others but on oneself.  This is not truly sharing the heart of God.  So if we are concerned solely with receiving love from others, it can lead us to become more egoistic and self-centered.

So according to Jesus, if we want to find the life of God, then we must seek it in our neighbors who are in need.  This is what the parable of the Samaritan is teaching us.  It teaches us to be concerned for others, even strangers and people who are hostile to us.  This was the case of the Samaritan.  He helped the injured Jew even though the latter regarded him as an enemy.  But that did not prevent him from reaching out to someone who was in need.  We can be certain that there was nothing for the Samaritan traveler to gain from this act.  He helped simply because he was moved with compassion.  By responding to the needs of this man, he therefore shared in the compassionate heart of God.

But there was something else in the way he helped.  He did not simply help from a distance.  Quite often when it comes to helping people, we are willing to help but only on certain conditions.  We are willing to help but we are not willing to get ourselves too involved in their lives.  So long as we are not personally involved in the lives of others, especially the poor, we will miss out the joy of service and compassion.  We will also not be able to truly empathize with them and share in their lives.  As a result, our compassion remains incomplete and perhaps cerebral.

However, those who are truly involved in the lives of the poor and the oppressed are also changed by them.  When we identify themselves with the poor and their sufferings in a very concrete way, we are charged with even more compassion and love.  Compassion implies having a common passion with the ones we love.  This explains why those who are involved in social work and works of compassion for the poor and needy are willing to exhaust not only their money and resources to help them, but their time and energy as well.  We must have a first-hand encounter with the sick and the poor in order to feel with them.

As we reach out to the poor, paradoxically we become more conscious of ourselves and learn to love ourselves.  Hence, to love God, we must love our neighbors as ourselves. In loving our neighbors, we actually truly love ourselves.  Through our involvement in the lives of the poor, we begin to be more appreciative of what we already have and how blessed we are.  If we think that our lives are miserable, we only need to reach out to those who are sick and poor, then we will come to realize how much more they are deprived than us; and yet many of them can be quite cheerful and contented with the little they have.  We will learn the art of contentment; the art of counting our blessings instead of our woes; appreciating what we already have and not what we have not.  Once we do this, we begin to love ourselves authentically and we become less envious, resentful and angry with others.

In loving ourselves, we discover the living God in us as well, since we too are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.  So by loving our neighbors, we find God within us.  This explains why the commandment to love our neighbors is put on the same level as loving ourselves.  When we love ourselves, then we find God is alive in us.  If God is absent from our lives, if we do not have a share in the life of God, it is because many of us do not love ourselves truly.

It is not surprising therefore that when we reach out to others; many of them in their need are able to see the presence of God in us.  The fact that they can see us as instruments of God and the messengers of God means that it is only through our participation in the compassionate love of God that we can truly claim to have a share in the life of God.  So many non-Catholics who stay in Catholic Aged Homes are eventually converted, not because of any compulsion or aggressive evangelization but simply because they can see the presence of God in those who serve them in the homes.   So too, many of us who studied in Catholic schools and got converted in the later years of our lives, did so because we were inspired by the religious brothers and sisters whom we came into contact with.   And this is because we saw the love of God in them through their selfless and humble service.

But how can we find the courage to reach out beyond ourselves?  In other words, where can we find the capacity to love others selflessly so that we can share in the life of God?  How can we be God’s presence to others?  To be truly the presence of God to others, it presupposes that we be filled with God’s presence which enables us to recognize God in others too.   Receiving our Lord in the Eucharist and contemplating on His Word is the way to be filled with His Spirit of love and compassion.

Written by The Most Rev William Goh Roman Catholic Archbishop of Singapore © All Rights Reserved