24th Sunday after Pentecost
Submission to the logic of Love will lead you to change your life; but is there something you’d rather be doing than the will of the omniscient and all-loving God?
Ephesians 2: 14-22
St. Luke 8: 5-15
Unity: a source of peace and joy
Both readings reinforce the consistent message of the Gospel: there are no divisions in love. Pride, meanness, apathy, lust, addiction, greed, jealousy… these things pull us apart; and while they are easy and come naturally in this fallen world, there is a greater power that can overcome them and bring us back together. God is the perfect and eternal source of that power. If you submit yourself to that love; if you let its power transform your life, you will never be alone. And the relationships that grow around you will become less a burden to be carried – a cross to be born – and more an opportunity to be surprised by joy. Instead of increasing your stress and uncertainty they will become a source of peace and happiness.
Your life will change
It is true that your life will change if you submit yourself to becoming perfect in unity and love. You will have less time, money, and energy to spend on things that pull you away from serving others. To the extent that you have allowed your habits to be determined by the world around you, the change may be great. If you do not pray for your neighbors and enemies, then you will have to make time for that. Ditto if you are not spending time uniting yourself to the source of perfection through daily adoration, thanks, and supplication. But since you are wasting less time on self-satisfying distractions, there should still be plenty of time for the other things that need to get done. As with someone who finally puts every dollar to work (and eliminating superfluous spending) through intentional budgeting, when you submit all our actions to love you will finally recognize how much of your lives you have wasted in foolishness.
Yes, your life will change. It will be directed towards something worthwhile; something lasting; something that brings peace and joy to you and the world around you. This is the life of love, made possible through Christ through whom “you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
The Problem
The problem is that we reject that power. We prefer to sustain the divisions that fracture our unity. We prefer the comfort of old animosities, apathies, and habits to the challenge of a new and better life. The psychology of the thing stacks the deck against us: unless we are really trying hard we will get our cues from the people around us. Everyone else is selfish, wastes time on trivialities, and takes love for granted. We are social creatures, so unless we pay attention, the same will come naturally to us. The matrix of the world’s indifference will become our reality.
This is what happened to the Rich Man. He allowed the world to tell him what to do with his time and his money. He allowed it to turn his love inward and thus pervert it. He allowed it to tell him that the suffering of the man at his gate was not his concern. He was comfortable with this way of life. I am sure his family and friends considered him a good person. But he was neither good nor really even a person. How can one be good while being indifferent towards another’s pain? How can one be human while living such a selfish lie?
The Solution
It may seem callous in the parable that Father Abraham does not agree to send Lazarus to go and warn the rich man’s family. But the point is that they have already been warned. They have already seen the suffering of their neighbor – what more is needed? They have been told again and again what love requires. They were told, and they rejected it. They preferred comfort and the illusion of control to doing what was right. And they, and those like them, will continue to do this even were one to “rise from the dead”. How do we know this to be the case?
Because Christ did rise from the dead. He continues to tell us that we are wasting our time and that we need to earnestly repent of this and dedicate ourselves to serving those around us. But people are so caught up in the matrix of this world that they pay Him no heed. They are so caught up in their own selfishness that they don’t even recognize their opportunities and obligations to do real good.
God has torn down the wall that divides us. We can live together with Him in joy and perfection. In His body we can all be one in purpose and destination. Will we reject this in favor of own divisions, our own purposes, and our own destinations?
No. We will not reject this. We will submit ourselves to His purpose. We will submit ourselves to this new way of life. We will submit ourselves to the demands of virtue. We will work with it to transform our relationships, to transform our families, to change our habits. We will not allow the world to determine what we value; we will not waste our time, money, and energy on foolishness; but [we will] devote everything we are, everything we know, and everything we have to the wonderful logic of love.
