Love and Communion

Gospel: Matthew 5: 38-48

In the commandment to love our neighbor there has been the continual human tendency to exclude people from this requirement.  Often it is based on race, or creed, or hatreds, or biases, or many other categories we invent to exclude someone from God's communion.  But Jesus makes clear that neighbor means whoever is near you, and since we are all children of the one God then we are all brothers and sisters and so everyone is near us, everyone must be loved by us.

Even so we continue to invent ways to exclude people from God's love and our own.  We continually hear the calls to exclude people from communion, and the practice of excommunication is still practiced - this in spite of the fact that Jesus ate at table with all sorts of people: prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, Pharisees, lawyers, Judas himself.  Apparently we know better than Jesus as to who is in communion and who is not.

But let us take heart that in spite of the behavior of humans we can never be separated from God's love.  Even when we sin and fall from grace God is ever wandering the highways and byways in search of his prodigal, the feast ever at the ready.  For God is forever and always love itself, and we who seek to be divinized and transformed into God must strive always to be this love in the world.