Love God, Love your Neighbor

Author: Chrisma C. Bangaoil

 Love God, Love your Neighbor

Reflection Date: October 7, 2024 Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary

Daily Readings: Galatians 1:6-12; Luke 10:25-37

 

The world had made a merchandise out of love. It has become just a byword, something that many find easy to blurt out but without meaning. Love has become synonymous to like or desire such that it has also become fleeting because like and desire are fleeting emotions.

Today’s readings exhort us to live the Gospel of Love because this is exactly how we can truly love and inherit the kingdom. How do we live this love that we profess for Christ? 

The Gospel tells us – love your neighbor. And yes, there’s a qualifier “as you love yourself”. 

But this is not the kind of self-love that we hear often these days. This self-love that the world promotes is selfish and directed only to the self. It’s Me-first and Me-only mentality.

Loving Christ through our neighbors is a sacrificial kind of love. It’s going out of our comfort zones just like what the good Samaritan in today’s Gospel did. He didn’t know the man but he helped him anyway – no questions asked, no conditions.

It is easy to say “I love you, Lord”. But how easy do we forget in exchange for something convenient and self-serving. The first reading tells us that. We easily forsake Christ for something else.

Call to Action for Catholic Living:  True love has eyes, ears, hands and feet. To be a true lover of Christ is to reach out to our neighbors, not only the ones we know and like, but even to those we do not know, the lost, least and the last. Let us act our love.