The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today challenge us to explore the foundation for our work as disciples of Jesus as we ponder our path to kinship with all people.
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| Kinship |
The reading from the Second Letter to Timothy urges us to be a worker approved by God.
* [2:8–13] The section begins with a sloganlike summary of Paul’s gospel about Christ (2 Tm 2:8) and concludes with what may be part of an early Christian hymn (2 Tm 2:11b–12a; most exegetes include the rest of 2 Tm 2:12 and all of 2 Tm 2:13 as part of the quotation). The poetic lines suggest that through baptism Christians die spiritually with Christ and hope to live with him and reign with him forever, but the Christian life includes endurance, witness, and even suffering, as the final judgment will show and as Paul’s own case makes clear; while he is imprisoned for preaching the gospel (2 Tm 2:9), his sufferings are helpful to the elect for obtaining the salvation and glory available in Christ (2 Tm 2:10), who will be true to those who are faithful and will disown those who deny him (2 Tm 2:12–13).1
The Psalmist prays that God will make us to know Your ways, O Lord.
* [Psalm 25] A lament. Each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Such acrostic Psalms are often a series of statements only loosely connected. The psalmist mixes ardent pleas (Ps 25:1–2, 16–22) with expressions of confidence in God who forgives and guides.2
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus declares the First Commandment in a context familiar to the Scribes.
* [12:13–34] In the ensuing conflicts (cf. also Mk 2:1–3:6) Jesus vanquishes his adversaries by his responses to their questions and reduces them to silence (Mk 12:34). See note on Mt 22:34–40.3
Luis Rodriguez, S.J. notes the words quoted by Jesus in today’s gospel reading are those of the Shemá Israel (hear, Israel) [Dt. 6: 4-5] engraved in the heart of every faithful Israelite. Those words were recited every morning upon waking up and Jesus must have also recited them. The core message was one of wholeheartedness: with all your heart... Those words were addressed to all Israelites, but they remain valid for any believer. There is no such thing as a call to half-heartedness.
Surely, there is a diversity of vocations among the baptized. However that diversity lies not on the side of the expected response, but on the side of the calling itself, on the side of what we already desire to respond to wholeheartedly. Baptism is a calling to the wholeheartedness of the Shemá. But through prayerful reflection on our life experience we try to recognize the path the Lord is inviting us to follow and then our response, which we already desired to be wholehearted, leads us to marriage, priesthood, religious life... medicine, law, nursing, teaching...
The difference among vocations lies not on the side of the expected response, but the side of the diverse calling we are expected to respond to wholeheartedly.4
Don Schwager quotes “Love God with one's whole self,” by Gregory of Nyssa, 330-395 AD.
"Human life consists in a threefold unity. We are taught similarly by the apostle in what he says to the Ephesians, praying for them that the complete grace of their 'body and soul and spirit' may be preserved at the coming of the Lord. We use the word 'body,' for the nutritive part, the word for the vital, 'soul,' and the word 'spirit' for the intellective dimension. In just this way the Lord instructs the writer of the Gospel that he should set before every commandment that love to God which is exercised with all the heart and soul and mind (Mark 12:30; Matthew 22:37; Luke 10:27). This single phrase embraces the human whole: the corporeal heart, the mind as the higher intellectual and mental nature, and the soul as their mediator." (excerpt from ON THE MAKING OF MAN 8.5.10)5
The Word Among Us Meditation on 2 Timothy 2:8-15 comments that Paul trusted that even if he never got out of prison, the message of the gospel would still go forth because it is a living message. He believed that this message wouldn’t die with him. Truths like these gave him great hope, along with the freedom to keep preaching the word of God.
A word of caution: the message of the gospel may be powerful, but it’s a power that we need to take hold of. It won’t just come upon us on its own. When you hold fast to the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and all that his resurrection promises, you become more secure in him and his love, not in your circumstances. Suffering, anxiety, guilt over past sins, fear for the future—none of these have the final word. Jesus has the final word, and it is a word of freedom from sin and the promise of eternal life for all who believe.
So lean on the Lord and trust in his gospel. Believe that this “word of God” can flow from you just as it did from Paul (2 Timothy 2:9). Even when you are not openly sharing your faith, the word can still go out through the witness of your life. Whatever might be “chaining” you—even if it is a real prison—you can trust the word of God will not be chained. That word is alive in you, and it has the power to change lives.
“Yes, Lord, may the word of God go forth from me.”6
Friar Jude Winkler underlines the choice to deny Jesus in ours and we experience the consequence of separation. The Shema Israel is a credo formula giving our heart or intellect, our soul or life in persecution, our mind or clear conscience, and our strength or physical possessions wholeheartedly to God. Friar Jude reminds us that love of neighbour adds the horizontal dimension of our faith to the vertical dimension of Love of God.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, comments that often we strike the high moral distance that separates “us” from “them,” and yet it is God’s dream come true when we recognize that there exists no daylight between us. Serving others is good. It’s a start. But it’s just the hallway that leads to the Grand Ballroom.
Kinship—not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not “a man for others”; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that. . . .
No daylight to separate us.
Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. The prophet Habakkuk writes, “The vision still has its time, presses onto fulfillment and it will not disappoint . . . and if it delays, wait for it [2:3].”
Kinship is what God presses us on to, always hopeful that its time has come.7
The work of the disciple of Jesus is to share wholehearted Love, experienced in relationship with God, to build kinship among the community of people in our lives.
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