Love God by Loving Those He Loves
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, 3rd November, 2024, St. Monica’s Pastoral Area, Nyanya. Homily by Archbishop I. A. Kaigama
Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Hebrew 7:23-28; Mark12:28b-34
Love God by loving those He loves
I bring you greetings Fr. Boniface Neibo and your dear members of St. Monica’s Pastoral Area (only one year old), from the Holy Father, Pope Francis, at whose invitation, we all converged in Rome for about a month a Synod on Synodality. You may ask what were over 350 Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals, and priests including laymen, women, and Religious doing for one month in Rome? It was to pray, to discern, and to discuss how to journey together as a Church; to listen to one another and to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Guided by the Holy Spirit, we had very fruitful conversations, and the summary resolutions of the Synod truly show the working of God in His Church. The Holy Father immediately adopted the final document and said it had the authority of the post-synodal exhortation. Try and read it.
The Saints we celebrated on the 1st of November were people who, while they lived in this world, loved their neighbours, did good works but kept their eyes focused on the things above. Trusting in God’s grace, they tried to live according to His fundamental law of love.
As we get closer to the end of the year. The readings draw our attention to the contemporary reality – a world rapidly losing the sense of neighbour. Individualism seems to be the order of the day. Everybody thinks only of himself or herself. People hardly think of the other. They think they can relate with God alone, with or without their brothers and sisters. But the truth is, if we ignore our brother or sister, we will soon ignore God also. So, love of God and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin. They cannot be separated. In other words, you cannot speak to God lovingly in prayer if you don’t treat your neighbor lovingly in action. There is a popular saying that expresses this point rather well. It says: “I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see. I sought my God, but my God eluded me. I sought my brother, and I found all three.”
The key to a loving contact with God and with our own soul is a loving contact with our neighbor.
To love God without loving the neighbor is hypocrisy. St John said, “Those who say ‘I love God and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20-21). Love of God necessarily flows down to the love of the neighbour. Our love has to have a human form because in the end, we will be judged, not by how long we lived, but by how much we loved.
Is there anyone that you refuse to talk to, see, or visit, yet you are in Church?
How friendly are you with those you share the same neighborhood?
How many people have you refused to forgive or become reconciled with? Yet you claim to be a practicing Christian?
Saint Augustine, in a sermon on Love, says, “Love and do what you like.” This statement means that freedom comes from true love. When we genuinely love God and our neighbour, our actions naturally align with God’s will. Love becomes the guiding principle of our lives, leading us to act justly, kindly, and humbly. It is not about following a set of rigid rules, but about allowing love to permeate every aspect of our lives. So many people cross oceans, climb mountains in search of God, but one place they rarely search for God is in their fellow human beings.
To the question, ‘what is the first/greatest commandment’ Jesus gave a one-in-two answer: love of God and love of neighbor. By this, Jesus means to say, the two cannot be separated. You cannot spend the whole day praying to God, but cannot create time to talk to your neighbor. It is not so much the love of God and the love of neighbor, but the love of God through the love of neighbour. St. Basil says: “In keeping the first commandment, one also keeps the second and through keeping the second, one returns again to the first.”
In the first reading, Moses the Law-giver, gave the people the Law of God and assured them of the blessing that comes from obeying these laws. But with time, the Scribes and Pharisees multiplied these laws that Moses gave them, to about 613 so that the people became confused as to the most important of the laws. And so, when the Scribe came to ask Jesus the question as regards the greatest law, Jesus used the opportunity to teach a very great lesson on love. The Scribes laid so much emphasis on ritual observances such as sacrifices and holocausts, Sabbath restrictions, paying of tithes as well as ritual restrictions. What mattered for them was the letter of the laws, rather than the spirit of the law. But for Jesus, the law of love supersedes the rest of the laws. Jesus means to teach us that there is more to religion than rituals. Jesus observed that the Scribes and Pharisees were deficient in what He called the weightier matters of the law namely: love and care, mercy and compassion, justice and fair play.
One would imagine that in a neighbourhood likes this, everyone would be everyone’s brother’s or sister’s keeper. But it will surprise you how often crimes are perpetrated; people burgle and steal from their neighbours (somebody’s moulded cement blocks and iron rods were stolen); people strive to pull their brother/sister down; brother bewitch brother; and so many evils perpetrated among neighbourhood dwellers (remember the incident of a young man climbing a street light pole and hacking it down). The next thing is to point accusing fingers at the government as the reason why things are hard. Yes, the government have their role to play, but the bulk of the work is on us the masses who will not deal lovingly with one another. We are our own woe. We need to treat one another with a little bit of love and respect. When you hear people from one religion refer derogatorily to the others from another religion, you wonder if they know God at all. Little wonder, it is said that only love makes the world go round. Let each person do the little good he or she can in their own corner of the world and we shall see a remarkable difference.
For those of you who will be confirmed today, 205 of you, you must bear the fruits of love. The same goes for you, who will be wedded today. We must henceforth live our lives as those who have received the gifts of the Holy Spirit and we must allow those gifts to transform us into instruments to spread God’s love to the ends of the earth. Since most of you are young and use the social media, go to the social media and see the video clips that pour venom of hatred. Calling names, and degrading the other is sometimes done by religious leaders who don’t deserve to be leaders at all. Matthew 18:6: “But whoever will have led astray one of these little ones, who trust in me, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck, and to be submerged in the depths of the sea.” Parents should be the first to teach their children love. But these days, instead of parents teaching their children how to love God through loving their neighbors, they indoctrinate and instigate them to hate. As long as parents and teachers fail to transmit these teachings to them, the society will continue to be in a worse state. Only the practice of the love of God and neighbor will help us get rid of corruption, insecurity, economic hardship, immorality, ethnicity, etc.
Those of you who will also be inaugurated as members of the new pastoral council and laity council, you are also leaders and you must lead with love. In fact, love should be your guiding principle. Before the Mass, I was privileged to go to your permanent site. Fr. Neibo took me there. It was quite a wonderful sight to behold. Well done for all your efforts and sacrifices. May the Good Lord reward you all. So as councils (Pastoral and Laity), work with your priest in charge, give him your maximum cooperation and support so that church can continue to grow.
We pray that through the intercession of our Mother Mary, we will have a heart to love God and our neighbour. May this type of love fill our hearts and guide our actions, today and always.
