Monday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time
The year my father passed away, my family decided to participate in a program that provided Christmas gifts to families in need who had suffered an unusual loss of some kind in the previous year. We sponsored several families and bought gifts for the children and parents based on the lists they themselves had written. I will always remember delivering those gifts and the faces of the children receiving their presents. Even more memorable was seeing the parents, some with tears of gratitude in their eyes, watching their children opening presents they themselves could not afford to buy for them. The experience of personally meeting and embracing these families far exceeded any presents we received that Christmas.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is dining at the home of a Pharisee. He tells the host not to invite relatives and friends he knows will repay him. Jesus says “invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Now it is natural to share dinners and celebrations with the ones we love and I don’t think Jesus means us to stop doing that. But if I am a Christian, Jesus asks me to do more than what just comes naturally. When Jesus uses the word “invite” it seems he means something personal. The love of Jesus consists in loving all persons perfectly, unconditionally, and in a deeply personal way. His love embraces, accepts, penetrates, and transforms. His love is deep and wide and broad and is beyond our comprehension. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” cries the apostle Paul in today’s first reading. There is absolutely nothing shallow or distant or hands-off about God’s love. And He loves the arrogant and hard hearted as well as the crippled, blind, and lame.
Through baptism, I have been offered the grace to love in a way that is beyond my human nature, to love in the way Jesus loves. This means I have been given the ability to love more than just my family and friends. It means, when I am rightly disposed, I am capable of loving others in the deeply personal way that Jesus does. So when I meet any person they can experience an encounter with Christ through me. It does not matter what wounds, failures, blindness, or poverty the other person carries. This Love which is God, through Christ, responds, receives, embraces, and pours itself out to others through me.
God places these opportunities to truly love others right in front of me everyday. Who are the poor, crippled, lame, and blind that I meet each day? They may not be who I expect. The poor might be my wealthy friend who sees no value in praying, the crippled may be the addict who has suffered yet another relapse, the lame my next door neighbor who cannot get to the grocery, isolating herself instead of asking for help, and the blind my coworker who is always angry and has no idea why everyone avoids her. What opportunity has God given me on this day to “invite” someone to experience the love which is God?
Today I pray that when I encounter the person God places in my path I will recognize their beloved-ness and respond to their need with Christ’s love. I pray I will invite them, embrace them, and accept them with the same incomprehensible love of God that has been offered to me. Amen.
Gail Lyman