Reflection
The community of love which Jesus preached is only the consequence of another essential reality: the all-embracing love of God. Jesus saw things from God’s viewpoint. And so, Jesus tells us that when we do not love someone, we are refusing to love someone whom God loves. God loves everyone including those who do not return that love. Our enemy is loved by God who loves without limits. In our thoughts and actions, God should be our reference. As followers of Christ, our minds are to be in tune with God’s. This perspective is what directs our understanding and actions.
Prayer
Help me to try to see others as God sees them.
Action
Who do I keep outside my circle of love? Why? What can I do to be inclusive?
Suggested Reading
Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said, You
shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love
your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may
be children of God, who makes the sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those
who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors
do the same? And if you greet your brothers and sisters only, what is
unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect,
just as your God is perfect.”
Matthew 5:43-48
The entire law is summed up in a single command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Galatians 5:14
We are all called upon to bear witness to and to proclaim the message that ‘God is love,’ that God is not distant from us or insensible to our human affairs.
Pope Francis
Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.
Pope Francis
Without love and compassion for others, our own apparent love for Christ is fiction.
Thomas Merton
But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent van Gogh
God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Timaeus of Locris
The story of a love is not important – what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
Julia Child
To love another person is to touch the face of God.
From the musical Les Miserables