Love your neighbour by seeing Christ in each other

30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ex 22:21-27
Second Reading: 1 Thes 1:5c-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 22:34-40

In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, Christ tells us to love God. It is easy to see why, for God made us to know him, love him, and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.

However, Christ also tells us to love each other as we love ourselves. That is not quite so easy.

“By communicating his Spirit, Christ mystically constitutes as his body those brothers of his who are called together from every nation,” Vatican II explains. “In that body the life of Christ is communicated to those who believe and who, through the sacraments, are united in a hidden and real way to Christ in his passion and glorification.”

Those who share Christ’s life are all members, or organs, of his mystical body, St. Paul says. “The body is one and has many members, but all the members, many though they are, are one body: and so it is with Christ. It was in one Spirit that all of us, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, were baptized into one body. All of us have been given to drink of the one Spirit.”

“You, then, are the body of Christ,” he finishes. “Every one of you is a member of it.”

A leg, for example, cannot get on without the rest of the body. It needs the eyes to see where to go. It needs the digestive system for energy and materials for growth and repair. Moreover, its very identity comes from its role in the body. Insofar as it cannot enable the body to move, it is not a leg. It can be cut off, thrown into the fire, and burnt, to use Christ’s image.

Similarly, if we are all members of the same body, none of us can get on without the rest of the body. Moreover, our very identity and personality come from our role in the body.

Of course, then, we should see and love Christ in each other, for we are all parts of the body of which he is the head. We all have a family resemblance, spiritual and physical. Just as we say when we look at a boy that we can “see his father in him,” so we should see Christ in everyone.

However, we have all inherited a certain “shortsightedness” from Adam and Eve, who chose to center their lives on themselves rather than on God. Just as a shortsighted person can see only the things that are close to him, so we each tend to think our own self more important than any other self, just because it is ours. Even if we cannot rationally think so, we act so.

This tendency is called pride. The Church considers it a “capital” sin because it stands at the “head” of all our failures to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Because of our pride, loving our neighbour feels like denying ourselves. It feels like dying, because it means killing our inappropriate (“inordinate”) self-love, like the selfishness that makes some people try to avoid the COVID-19 virus themselves, but refuse to wear masks or sanitize their surroundings to help protect others.

This unjustified self-love not only makes us prefer our own well-being to that of our neighbours, but also, as this Sunday’s First Reading warns, leads us to “put down” foreigners, like the Chinese, in whose country the COVID-19 virus is thought to have jumped from bats to humans. (As the Baha’i slogan puts it, “One world, one people, please.”)

In the words of the hymn, the world will know we are Christians by our love for others. Only thus can we show the world how to love God and his Son, like the Thessalonians in the second reading.

“The commandment we have from him is this,” St. John says: “whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English course free of charge. All materials (video and print) are available online at www.beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 8, “Liturgy: Public Worship,"  will be available Oct. 25.