Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time – 3rd November 2024
Love God and love your neighbour. This short and clear commandment expresses the whole of the law of God. Today we don’t like to think of God’s word as a law, so we can say simply that this short statement sums up the whole of our Christian life. It is so very simple and so very difficult.
Loving God has always been a bit difficult because God is not present the way that another person is present. This difference also has made loving God easier because we are never quite sure what it means to love God. We do know that we must prefer God and His word, His Scriptures to all other realities.
The invitation to love God and to love our neighbour becomes very concrete in the love of neighbour. It is not just any neighbour that we must love, but the neighbour who is right in front of us. The neighbour is not the person who lives next door but any human being who happens into our life. This neighbour is especially the person that we don’t want to help, the person who may have injured us, the person who seems unworthy of our help, the person who will take more of our time than we want to give.