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."
A reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to Thessalonians 1:5c-10
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.
Gospel of the day From the Gospel according to Matthew 22:34-40
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."
The words of the Popes This Sunday’s Gospel (Mk 12:28-34) offers us Jesus’ teaching on the greatest commandment, the commandment of love, which is two-fold: love of God and love of neighbour. (…) Before being a command — love is not a command — it is a gift, a reality that God allows us to know and experience, so that, like a seed, it can also germinate within us and develop throughout our life.
If the love of God has planted deep roots in a person, then he is able to love even those who do not deserve it, as God does us. Fathers and mothers do not love their children only when they deserve love; they always love them, though of course, they make them understand when they are wrong. We learn from God to seek only what is good and never what is evil. We learn to look at each other not only with our eyes, but with the eyes of God, which is the gaze of Jesus Christ. A gaze that begins in the heart and does not stop at the surface, that goes beyond appearances and manages to capture the deepest aspirations of the other: waiting to be heard, for caring attention, in a word: love. But the opposite is also true: that by opening myself to another, just as he or she is, by reaching out, by making myself available, I am also opening myself to know God, to feel that he is there and is good. Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable and are mutually related. (Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus, 4 November 2012)
May the Lord grant us the grace, only this one: pray for our enemies; to pray for those who wish us ill, who do not love us; to pray for those who do us harm, who persecute us. And of us knows them by both names” I pray for this person, for that person, for this person, for that person… I assure that that this prayer will do two things: it will make the person better, because prayer is powerful and it will make us more as children of the Father. ( P. FRANCIS Santa Marta 14 June 2016)
Sunday, 25 October 2020 Dear Brothers and Sisters, Good morning! In today’s Gospel passage (cf. Mt 22:34-40), a doctor of the Law asks Jesus “which is the great commandment” (v. 36), that is, the principal commandment of all divine Law. Jesus simply answers: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (v. 37). And he immediately adds: “And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (v. 39).
Jesus’ response once again takes up and joins two fundamental precepts, which God gave his people through Moses (cf. Dt 6:5; Lv 19:18). And thus he overcomes the snare that is laid for him in order “to test him” (Mt 22:35). His questioner, in fact, tries to draw him into the dispute among the experts of the Law regarding the hierarchy of the prescriptions. But Jesus establishes two essential principles for believers of all times; two essential principles of our life. The first is that moral and religious life cannot be reduced to an anxious and forced obedience. There are people who seek to fulfil the commandments in an anxious or forced manner, and Jesus helps us understand that moral and religious life cannot be reduced to anxious or forced obedience, but must have love as its precept. The second principle is that love must tend together and inseparably toward God and toward neighbour. This is one of the primary innovations of Jesus’ teachings, and it helps us understand that what is not expressed in love of neighbour is not true love of God; and, likewise, what is not drawn from one’s relationship with God is not true love of neighbour.
Jesus concludes his response with these words: “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets” (v. 40). This means that all the precepts the Lord has given to his people must be related to love of God and neighbour. In fact, all the commandments serve to implement, to express that twofold indivisible love. Love for God is expressed above all in prayer, particularly in adoration. We neglect the adoration of God a great deal. We recite the prayer of thanksgiving, the supplication to ask for something..., but we neglect adoration. Adoring God is precisely the heart of prayer. And love for neighbour, which is also called fraternal charity, consists in closeness, listening, sharing, caring for others. And so often we neglect to listen to others because it is boring or because it takes up our time, or [we neglect] to accompany them, to support them in their suffering, in their trials.... But we always find the time to gossip, always! We do not have time to console the afflicted, but so much time to gossip. Be careful!
The Apostle John writes: “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen ” (1 Jn 4:20). Thus, we see the unity of these two commandments.
In today’s Gospel passage, once again, Jesus helps us go to the living and gushing wellspring of Love. And this wellspring is God himself, to be loved completely in a communion that nothing and no one can break. A communion that is a gift to be requested each day, but also a personal commitment not to let our lives become enslaved by the idols of the world. And the proof of our journey of conversion and holiness always consists in love of neighbour. This is the test: if I say “I love God” and do not love my neighbour, it does not work. The verification that I love God is that I love my neighbour. As long as there is a brother or sister to whom we close our hearts, we will still be far from being disciples as Jesus asks us. But his divine mercy does not allow us to be discouraged, but rather calls us to begin anew each day to live the Gospel consistently. May the intercession of Mary Most Holy open our hearts to welcome the “great commandment”, the twofold commandment of love, which contains all of God’s Law and on which our salvation depends. POPE FRANCIS ANGELUS
Sunday, 29 October 2023 Dear brothers and sisters, buongiorno! Today’s Gospel speaks to us about the greatest of the commandments (cf. Mt 22:34-40). A doctor of the law questions Jesus about this and He responds with the “great commandment of love”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “your neighbour as yourself” (vv. 37, 39). Love of God and neighbour are inseparable from each other. Let us pause a bit to reflect on this.
The first one, the fact that love for the Lord comes first, reminds us that God always precedes us, he anticipates us with his infinite tenderness (cf. 1 Jn 4:19), with his closeness, with his mercy, for he is always near, tender and merciful. Babies learn to love on their mother’s and father’s knees, and we do so in God’s arms. The Psalm says, “Like a weaned child in their mother’s arms” (cf. 131:2). This is how we should feel in God’s arms. And there, we absorb the Lord’s affection. There, we encounter the love that impels us to give ourselves generously. Saint Paul recalls this when he says that Christ’s charity possesses a power that propels toward loving (cf. 2 Cor 5:14). And everything originates in him. You cannot truly love others if you do not have this root, which is God’s love, Jesus’ love.
And now the second aspect that emerges from the commandment of love. It connects love of God to love of neighbour: it means that by loving our brothers and sisters, we reflect the Father’s love like mirrors. To reflect God’s love, this is the point — to love he whom we do not see through the brother/sister we do see (cf. 1 Jn 4:20). One day, Saint Teresa of Calcutta replied to a journalist who had asked her if she had illusions about changing the world through what she was doing: “I never thought I could change the world! I only wanted to be a drop of clean water, through which God’s love could shine” (Meeting with journalists after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Rome, 1979). This is how she, who was so little, was able to do so much good — by reflecting God’s love like a drop [of water]. And if while looking at her and other saints, we might sometimes be tempted to think that they are inimitable heroes, let us think again about this small drop: love is a drop that can change many things. And how can this be done? Taking the first step, always. Sometimes it is not easy to take the first step, to forget things…, to take the first step. Let’s do that! This is the drop: to take the first step. So, dear brothers and sisters, thinking about God’s love that always precedes us, we can ask ourselves: Am I grateful to the Lord, who loves me first? Do I feel God’s love and am I grateful to him? And do I try to reflect his love? Do I strive to love my brothers and sisters, to take this second step? May the Virgin Mary help us live the great commandment of love in our daily life: to love and to allow God to love us, and to love our brothers and sisters. ANGELUS - POPE FRANCIS
FAUSTI - "You will love" God is Love, and He commands us to love. To co-mmand means to send together: God sends us together towards love, so that His Life may also become ours. Love, in fact, makes one's life become the life of the other. The desire to be like God is not fulfilled by having everything in one's hands, but by putting oneself in the hands of the Father and one's brothers and sisters, for love! In love there is no good and evil, there is only good! God cannot be grasped with the mind or hands, but "understand, contain" in the heart. To love is to have the other in the heart. We are made to love, because God made us in His image and likeness. To know serves to love: one does not love except what one knows. And to love in turn serves to understand: one does not understand anything except what one loves. Love and intellect are mutually nourished: it is the dynamic tension proper to love, in an endless virtuous circle. Love concerns not only the heart and mind, but also life. Love is above all joy of the heart for the good of the other (the opposite is envy): it is expressed with the mouth as praise (the opposite is criticism), and is realized with the hands, placed at the service of the other as well as of myself. It manifests itself more in deeds than in words. Let us love one another not with words, but with deeds and in truth (1Jn 3:18). Love leads one to communicate what one has and is, until the union of intellect, will and action. Diversity and limitations -even negative ones- are not a place of concealment and aggression, perpetrated or suffered, but of acceptance and mutual service. The command is twofold: Loving God and neighbor, because only by loving the Father and brothers and sisters we become what we are: children. In this way we reach our identity, healing the original break with the Other, with ourselves and with others. Jesus is the Lord who makes Himself my neighbor and loves me with all His heart, so that I can do the same. With the same love I love Him and my brother, because He became my brother; I love God and man because God became man! For every time I love the last of my brothers, I love Him (Mt25) who became the last of all. Mutual love is the badge of the Christian. "By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (Jn 13:35). Jesus is the most beautiful Name, as Paul says, "the Name above all other Names, and in His Name let every knee bend in heaven, on earth and under the ground, and let every tongue proclaim that Jesus is Lord, to the Glory of the Father" (Eph 2:9-1). And we ask Jesus to give us His own Love for the Father, to love Him as He does, with all the heart, with all the mind, with all the strength! I ask Jesus for forgiveness for having sometimes forgotten to be always loved by the Father, in any trial, suffering, humiliation. Always and everywhere the Father is Love, only Love, for everyone. Only Jesus has glorified the Father in total obedience, and I, rebellious and inconstant, still do not know how to trust Him totally, and I desire to defend myself, to make myself right. Only Jesus loved me at all costs, He gave His Life, He conquered my darkness. To the Lord only Glory, Trust, Praise, Adoration, Blessing! He is Our Creator, the Lord, He alone is healing, He alone is embrace, He alone is the total gift without measure of the Spirit! (Jn 3:34) And for every pain, let us invoke Him, let us contemplate His wounds, His Cross, The Love that conquered the world... Let us look at the great trial we are living, He is present, as He promised us and we entrust ourselves to Him, the Living One forever, and we are children with Him. And with Him we love the Father, we invoke Him, to the Father only our hands raised, Our "Thy Will be done" and "Thy Kingdom come". The Father knows what we need! As children we ask with confidence! And not only for us, but for the brothers and sisters we love as ourselves, purified by His forgiveness, we ask for everyone, for every pain, for every need, for every sigh!
A reading from the Book of Exodus
RispondiElimina22:20-26
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."
A reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to Thessalonians
1:5c-10
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.
Gospel of the day
From the Gospel according to Matthew
22:34-40
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."
The words of the Popes
This Sunday’s Gospel (Mk 12:28-34) offers us Jesus’ teaching on the greatest commandment, the commandment of love, which is two-fold: love of God and love of neighbour. (…) Before being a command — love is not a command — it is a gift, a reality that God allows us to know and experience, so that, like a seed, it can also germinate within us and develop throughout our life.
If the love of God has planted deep roots in a person, then he is able to love even those who do not deserve it, as God does us. Fathers and mothers do not love their children only when they deserve love; they always love them, though of course, they make them understand when they are wrong. We learn from God to seek only what is good and never what is evil. We learn to look at each other not only with our eyes, but with the eyes of God, which is the gaze of Jesus Christ. A gaze that begins in the heart and does not stop at the surface, that goes beyond appearances and manages to capture the deepest aspirations of the other: waiting to be heard, for caring attention, in a word: love. But the opposite is also true: that by opening myself to another, just as he or she is, by reaching out, by making myself available, I am also opening myself to know God, to feel that he is there and is good. Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable and are mutually related.
(Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus, 4 November 2012)
May the Lord grant us the grace, only this one: pray for our enemies; to pray for those who wish us ill, who do not love us; to pray for those who do us harm, who persecute us. And of us knows them by both names” I pray for this person, for that person, for this person, for that person… I assure that that this prayer will do two things: it will make the person better, because prayer is powerful and it will make us more as children of the Father. ( P. FRANCIS Santa Marta 14 June 2016)
EliminaSunday, 25 October 2020
EliminaDear Brothers and Sisters,
Good morning!
In today’s Gospel passage (cf. Mt 22:34-40), a doctor of the Law asks Jesus “which is the great commandment” (v. 36), that is, the principal commandment of all divine Law. Jesus simply answers: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (v. 37). And he immediately adds: “And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (v. 39).
Jesus’ response once again takes up and joins two fundamental precepts, which God gave his people through Moses (cf. Dt 6:5; Lv 19:18). And thus he overcomes the snare that is laid for him in order “to test him” (Mt 22:35). His questioner, in fact, tries to draw him into the dispute among the experts of the Law regarding the hierarchy of the prescriptions. But Jesus establishes two essential principles for believers of all times; two essential principles of our life. The first is that moral and religious life cannot be reduced to an anxious and forced obedience. There are people who seek to fulfil the commandments in an anxious or forced manner, and Jesus helps us understand that moral and religious life cannot be reduced to anxious or forced obedience, but must have love as its precept. The second principle is that love must tend together and inseparably toward God and toward neighbour. This is one of the primary innovations of Jesus’ teachings, and it helps us understand that what is not expressed in love of neighbour is not true love of God; and, likewise, what is not drawn from one’s relationship with God is not true love of neighbour.
Jesus concludes his response with these words: “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets” (v. 40). This means that all the precepts the Lord has given to his people must be related to love of God and neighbour. In fact, all the commandments serve to implement, to express that twofold indivisible love. Love for God is expressed above all in prayer, particularly in adoration. We neglect the adoration of God a great deal. We recite the prayer of thanksgiving, the supplication to ask for something..., but we neglect adoration. Adoring God is precisely the heart of prayer. And love for neighbour, which is also called fraternal charity, consists in closeness, listening, sharing, caring for others. And so often we neglect to listen to others because it is boring or because it takes up our time, or [we neglect] to accompany them, to support them in their suffering, in their trials.... But we always find the time to gossip, always! We do not have time to console the afflicted, but so much time to gossip. Be careful!
The Apostle John writes: “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen ” (1 Jn 4:20). Thus, we see the unity of these two commandments.
In today’s Gospel passage, once again, Jesus helps us go to the living and gushing wellspring of Love. And this wellspring is God himself, to be loved completely in a communion that nothing and no one can break. A communion that is a gift to be requested each day, but also a personal commitment not to let our lives become enslaved by the idols of the world. And the proof of our journey of conversion and holiness always consists in love of neighbour. This is the test: if I say “I love God” and do not love my neighbour, it does not work. The verification that I love God is that I love my neighbour. As long as there is a brother or sister to whom we close our hearts, we will still be far from being disciples as Jesus asks us. But his divine mercy does not allow us to be discouraged, but rather calls us to begin anew each day to live the Gospel consistently.
May the intercession of Mary Most Holy open our hearts to welcome the “great commandment”, the twofold commandment of love, which contains all of God’s Law and on which our salvation depends.
POPE FRANCIS ANGELUS
Sunday, 29 October 2023
RispondiEliminaDear brothers and sisters, buongiorno!
Today’s Gospel speaks to us about the greatest of the commandments (cf. Mt 22:34-40). A doctor of the law questions Jesus about this and He responds with the “great commandment of love”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “your neighbour as yourself” (vv. 37, 39). Love of God and neighbour are inseparable from each other. Let us pause a bit to reflect on this.
The first one, the fact that love for the Lord comes first, reminds us that God always precedes us, he anticipates us with his infinite tenderness (cf. 1 Jn 4:19), with his closeness, with his mercy, for he is always near, tender and merciful. Babies learn to love on their mother’s and father’s knees, and we do so in God’s arms. The Psalm says, “Like a weaned child in their mother’s arms” (cf. 131:2). This is how we should feel in God’s arms. And there, we absorb the Lord’s affection. There, we encounter the love that impels us to give ourselves generously. Saint Paul recalls this when he says that Christ’s charity possesses a power that propels toward loving (cf. 2 Cor 5:14). And everything originates in him. You cannot truly love others if you do not have this root, which is God’s love, Jesus’ love.
And now the second aspect that emerges from the commandment of love. It connects love of God to love of neighbour: it means that by loving our brothers and sisters, we reflect the Father’s love like mirrors. To reflect God’s love, this is the point — to love he whom we do not see through the brother/sister we do see (cf. 1 Jn 4:20). One day, Saint Teresa of Calcutta replied to a journalist who had asked her if she had illusions about changing the world through what she was doing: “I never thought I could change the world! I only wanted to be a drop of clean water, through which God’s love could shine” (Meeting with journalists after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Rome, 1979). This is how she, who was so little, was able to do so much good — by reflecting God’s love like a drop [of water]. And if while looking at her and other saints, we might sometimes be tempted to think that they are inimitable heroes, let us think again about this small drop: love is a drop that can change many things. And how can this be done? Taking the first step, always. Sometimes it is not easy to take the first step, to forget things…, to take the first step. Let’s do that! This is the drop: to take the first step.
So, dear brothers and sisters, thinking about God’s love that always precedes us, we can ask ourselves: Am I grateful to the Lord, who loves me first? Do I feel God’s love and am I grateful to him? And do I try to reflect his love? Do I strive to love my brothers and sisters, to take this second step?
May the Virgin Mary help us live the great commandment of love in our daily life: to love and to allow God to love us, and to love our brothers and sisters.
ANGELUS - POPE FRANCIS
FAUSTI - "You will love" God is Love, and He commands us to love. To co-mmand means to send together: God sends us together towards love, so that His Life may also become ours. Love, in fact, makes one's life become the life of the other.
RispondiEliminaThe desire to be like God is not fulfilled by having everything in one's hands, but by putting oneself in the hands of the Father and one's brothers and sisters, for love! In love there is no good and evil, there is only good! God cannot be grasped with the mind or hands, but "understand, contain" in the heart. To love is to have the other in the heart. We are made to love, because God made us in His image and likeness. To know serves to love: one does not love except what one knows. And to love in turn serves to understand: one does not understand anything except what one loves. Love and intellect are mutually nourished: it is the dynamic tension proper to love, in an endless virtuous circle.
Love concerns not only the heart and mind, but also life. Love is above all joy of the heart
for the good of the other (the opposite is envy): it is expressed with the mouth as praise (the opposite is criticism), and is realized with the hands, placed at the service of the other as well as of myself. It manifests itself more in deeds than in words. Let us love one another not with words, but with deeds and in truth (1Jn 3:18).
Love leads one to communicate what one has and is, until the union of intellect, will and action.
Diversity and limitations -even negative ones- are not a place of concealment and aggression, perpetrated or suffered, but of acceptance and mutual service.
The command is twofold: Loving God and neighbor, because only by loving the Father and brothers and sisters we become what we are: children. In this way we reach our identity, healing the original break with the Other, with ourselves and with others.
Jesus is the Lord who makes Himself my neighbor and loves me with all His heart, so that I can do the same. With the same love I love Him and my brother, because He became my brother; I love God and man because God became man!
For every time I love the last of my brothers, I love Him (Mt25) who became the last of all.
Mutual love is the badge of the Christian. "By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (Jn 13:35).
Jesus is the most beautiful Name, as Paul says, "the Name above all other Names, and in His Name let every knee bend in heaven, on earth and under the ground, and let every tongue proclaim that Jesus is Lord, to the Glory of the Father" (Eph 2:9-1). And we ask Jesus to give us His own Love for the Father, to love Him as He does, with all the heart, with all the mind, with all the strength!
I ask Jesus for forgiveness for having sometimes forgotten to be always loved by the Father, in any trial, suffering, humiliation. Always and everywhere the Father is Love, only Love, for everyone.
Only Jesus has glorified the Father in total obedience, and I, rebellious and inconstant, still do not know how to trust Him totally, and I desire to defend myself, to make myself right.
Only Jesus loved me at all costs, He gave His Life, He conquered my darkness.
To the Lord only Glory, Trust, Praise, Adoration, Blessing! He is Our Creator, the Lord, He alone is healing, He alone is embrace, He alone is the total gift without measure of the Spirit! (Jn 3:34)
And for every pain, let us invoke Him, let us contemplate His wounds, His Cross, The Love that conquered the world...
Let us look at the great trial we are living, He is present, as He promised us and we entrust ourselves to Him, the Living One forever, and we are children with Him.
And with Him we love the Father, we invoke Him, to the Father only our hands raised, Our "Thy Will be done" and "Thy Kingdom come". The Father knows what we need! As children we ask with confidence! And not only for us, but for the brothers and sisters we love as ourselves, purified by His forgiveness, we ask for everyone, for every pain, for every need, for every sigh!