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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 25 2026
Thus says the LORD:
"You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.
You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.
My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword;
then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
"If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
by demanding interest from him.
If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body.
What else has he to sleep in?
If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate."
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
I love you, O Lord, my strength,
O Lord, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.
My God, my rock of refuge,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!
Praised be the Lord, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies.
The Lord lives and blessed be my rock!
Extolled be God my savior.
You who gave great victories to your king
and showed kindness to your anointed.
Brothers and sisters:
You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake.
And you became imitators of us and of the Lord,
receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit,
so that you became a model for all the believers
in Macedonia and in Achaia.
For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth
not only in Macedonia and in Achaia,
but in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything.
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
He said to him,
"You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
You shall love! Another unbelievable pillar of religion. Imagine, being commanded to love, when everybody knows that love cannot be commanded. Love is the very essence of freedom. Giving because I want to give; the free, self-motivated choosing of a free person for the sake not of profit to the one choosing but benefit to the one chosen. We give our love.
No third party can order me or command me to love you. It is my choice. And yet, the more I come to know you the more it feels like not a choice after all but a compulsion. I love you, and I can't help that. My friends say I'm blinded by my love, but if they saw you as I see you, they might get some idea of the powerful, invigorating, blinding force that is love. In the end love refuses to be denied.
Our love for our Father-God is parallel with our love for the father who gave us life of his life, genes of his genes, who inspired hopes and dreams in us from our earliest years. Or our mother! Both of course, but in the absence of either, a love that is mostly a hunger and deep longing for what we instinctively know ought to be. It is here that the healing work of friendship is seen: when we love another so as to share our best love with them and it turns out to be healing for them over a lifetime.
Sometimes those who have been greatly loved have learned to love greatly in return, and to be generous in their love for others - strangers, orphans. And sometimes it takes a lifetime for a person who has not been loved as a child to grow beyond a dark resentment they struggle to understand. God, the healing God, will be working throughout their lives to heal that wounded self. In God's relationship with us, nothing is more important than that we learn to love and so be able to love our heavenly Father. That's the purpose of it all. That's what it's all about.
* * * * *
How do you love God whom you cannot see or feel. Love after all is a feeling, not just a decision or a conviction. The ancient text says we are to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind! A healthy spirituality demands that we be totally involved, body and soul.
This is where we see that the insistence on loving our neighbour makes such good sense. It takes effort, energy and involvement to love someone, even a family member whom we feel strongly for. So God tells us that loving our neighbour is loving our God, for the neighbour is also divine just as we ourselves are divine. God identifies with us so that we are one with God. The Word of God, the Son, came among us as one of us to make us recognise this enormous reality, but it is so mind-blowing that we mostly avoid thinking about it in any but general terms. It seems we prefer a god who keeps his distance and lets us mess up our existence any way we like.
Paul wrote two or three letters to the community in Corinth some 20 years after the resurrection of Jesus and commissioning of the apostles to Go Teach. Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians is a beautiful study of love and what it entails:
Though I speak with all the tongues that men or angels use, if love is lacking I am no better than tinkling brass or clashing cymbals. Though I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. Though I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, is kind. It is not perverse or proud; never insolent . It is not self-seeking; it is not easily angered; it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in wrong-doing, but rejoices in the victory of truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. Now we see but dimly as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.*
This could provide a framework for checking out the genuineness of my love. So often there seems to be a reflex movement in my love that curls back to myself, looking for the pleasure I might be getting from this relationship. Maybe that's inevitable to some degree. We should be happy loving. But it has to be kept within limits or it will take over more and more. Selfishness is very sneaky.
In the end, just to remember that we are made to love as we are loved. It is in the giving of the self that the self is filled with love. Thanks be to God.
In the current climate, when hatred has been unleashed across the world, our mission might well be to sow seeds of love with every step we take. If good people could flood the world of social communications with love it would at least counterbalance the hatefilled words that are a corrupting acid eating the heart out of civilisation itself. One of our dedicated writers recently posted these words in another place:
The work of unity we are called to ... is not an easy thing. Unity in the face of inevitable disagreements, frustrations and so forth required careful safeguarding . We see this writ large in the Catholic "personalities" and camps which have come to prominence online. All too often even basic charity is discarded, with insults traded and mobs formed, We must resist this impulse in ourselves and avoid voices that fail in this regard. Charity must be a guiding light in approaching disagreements, from the parish tea group to global discourse. Interpreting the words and actions of others in the best possible light is a serious spiritual discipline. We must remember that whatever we say about a fellow Catholic, we say about a part of Christ's body.
Prayer for the day
Today, Lord, I want to be guided by a grateful heart.
As I understand it, such a heart doesn't search for what is missing,
but delights in what is present.
A grateful heart expects the best from others and gives its best in return.
A grateful heart forgets what might have been
and enjoys every moment of each new day as it comes.
A grateful heart is a prayer of its own -
one that fills the heavens with praise!
Please, Lord, give me a grateful heart.