31st Sunday - Fr. Leo
In answering the scribe in today’s gospel, Jesus sums up the spiritual life. We are to love God with our whole being, heart, soul, mind and strength. Then Jesus adds a new dimension insuperable from the first in the second command to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the perfect summary of how we are to live in God.
Jesus’ life lived out these two commandments. Jesus always loving the Father, strove to do his will in all things. The love he received from the Father he handed on to us that we might live as adopted sons of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ love for the Father lead him to do all he could to help us share in that same love by sharing in God’s divinity.
This is how we understand what it means to live in God. The challenge comes in becoming open to God’s will and to allow the Holy Spirit to make us instruments of the same love we have received. This is a life-long growing that ends in our embracing death on all levels that we might live in the Spirit alone.
At the end of today’s passage from Mark, Jesus says to the scribe. “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Let us first understand those words as a reminder of the indwelling of God in the ground of our being. Then secondly, let us understand Jesus’ words as an invitation to move our understanding of discipleship expressed, to simply have love in our hearts. It is there, beyond thoughts and feelings, that the transforming Spirit forms us into Christ.
In time our faithfulness will bring us to the crowning moment when we can say with St. Paul, “It is nolonger I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” May loving God with our whole mind, body, heart and soul and our Neighbor, as God loves us, become who we are in essence that we may always live in his eternal love now and forever. Amen.