Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle A
10/16/2020
October 25, 2020
Cycle A
We all know the story of how God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.
How He made a pact with them on Mount Sinai and promised to bring them to the Promised Land.
They in turn were to fulfill the rules or laws God gave them as His People.
The first reading gives a brief description of two of these laws.
Remember that widows and orphans were the poorest of the poor. For a wife to have lost her husband and to have no son to care for her, meant she was on the streets with nothing.
And for children to loose their dad meant they too were on the streets; they were orphans with nothing.
The truth is that the way to love God above all else is to help those who have nothing, even the alien, the stranger, the impossible person, the one who bugs us.
Jesus says the same in the Gospel for this Sunday.
So, we need to ask ourselves...
Who in your life is the alien?
Who in your life is the widow or the orphan?
Perhaps they are the spiritual widows and orphans
It is so easy to not recognize either of them in our own lives.
Look for them because they are all around us.
The person that at times we do not like.
The person that causes us difficulties.
The person we don't agree with.
The person we don't want to go out of my way for.
The person with a sign as we leave the freeway.
Etc.
Does God really want me to treat them as I treat myself?
Does God really expect me to go out of my way or to love them?
Deep down we really do know the answer to those questions
Christ found the widow and the orphan in all he encountered, even the enemy; even the ones who caused Him pain and death.
At our baptism we were each called by God to be the body of Christ present in the today's world.
We are to make Christ present to all we encounter in the world, and that means we need to continue to pray to fulfill being able to love God above all else; more than our possessions, our money, our vacation, our car, our home, etc. and to love the other, our spiritual orphans and widows, in other words to love all we encounter.
In Paul's letter, he praises the Thessalonians that they received the Good News and turned from their idols.
The Thessalonian Christian Community had begun to fulfill what Jesus was talking about, as we hear in the Gospel reading of this day..
At times, if we are honest with ourselves, we neither love God above all, nor do we love others as ourselves.
It is important not to escape recognizing this.
It is important not to make excuses.
The truth is that we are called to love God above all and we do this by loving the other.
The two go together.
When we discover we can't do this or we won't do this, we can ask God to continue to work on us and change our hearts but...
But if we make excuses, or say that it is impossible; then we will never let God into our hearts and change us.
The first step, is not to panic, but to ask for the grace to change, and to never, never, give up.
God will never give up on us!
He calls us again and again!
The devil, the evil one, always tries to convince us
that we will never change!
What a lie!
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