Love of God and neighbor!

Homily for Thursday between Epiphany and Baptism
7 January 2010
St. Lawrence Chapel, University of Kansas
Year for Priests

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Jesus in proclaiming Himself to be the anointed one in his hometown synagogue, announces as well his public ministry to go out and to proclaim liberty and to bring healing, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. Jesus shows that his being the anointed one is not merely for his own benefit, but is for the benefit of all those to whom He will be sent. Jesus thus announces his intention to fulfill what we hear is essential in our letter today from St. John, that we if we say we love God, then we must also love our brother.

The love of God is always primary, and the love of brother secondary. But as St. John tells us, the love of our brother is no less essential. Whoever says otherwise is a liar. Our piety and the contemplation of God's love is always primary. We should love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our mind, and with all our strength. To do so is to cultivate an identity as one who is seen and known and loved by God, so that we might act always out of this dignity that we have as children of God. Our actions, how we relate to our brother, should always be a reflection of who we know ourselves to be. So our piety, our contemplation of God's love, should never take a back seat to the love of neighbor. We will not know how to perfectly love our neighbor if we are not contemplating the love of God. We may do many good things for them, but we will not love them perfectly. For as St. John reminds us, we do not know how to love perfectly on our own. For this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us, and has sent His Son among us to show us how to love perfectly.

Still, St. John corrects us from the notion that our piety can rightfully separate us from our neighbor. Circumstantially, this may be the case. The decisions we make about ordering our lives around the love of God, and making time to contemplate his glory and goodness and love, might change circumstantially the people we know and the people we relate to. Yet our love of God is only authentic if it puts us in deeper relationship with, and gives us a greater love for, our neighbor, whoever that neighbor happens to be. To put it another way, our piety can never be a refuge away from people we find difficult to love; rather, our piety and the contemplation of the love of God can only free us to love our neighbor more deeply.

And so we prepare ourselves now, as we near the end of the Christmas season and celebrate soon the Baptism of Jesus, to like him recommit ourselves to going out in the new year to not only love God more perfectly, but to be more generous in loving our neighbor, just as God has first loved us! +m