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​For many youth and young adults who actively participated in intentional communities such as youth groups and college ministries, what endures beyond the events, emotional and spiritual ‘highs’, and accolades is friendship in its truest form. Adults discover this same and unique experience of relationship in parish small groups, retreats, bible study groups and ministries. Although not all have the ideal experience, the many do discover that true friends share in each other’s joys and support one another through challenging times; they help each other grow in emotional and intellectual maturity, faith, virtue, knowledge of self and understanding of ‘the other’.  They help each other to become that which they were made to be, men and women of communion.
 
This “personal identity that is at once an orientation to the other is founded essentially on the Trinity of divine Persons. God is not a solitary being, but a communion of three Persons… no person is as such alone in the universe but is always constituted with others and is summoned to form a community with them. Pgh 41 ITC Communion and stewardship: Human persons created in the image of God
 
What distinguishes this Christian experience from others is that the Christian experience is rooted in affirmation of the nature of the human person, as created by God in the image and likeness of God.  It therefore holds up the choice to love as charity, which is virtue, and aims for authentic self-gift, to love by willing the good of the other. If a so-called Christian intentional community is not so rooted, it becomes merely another social grouping of like-minded folks unattached to universal truth and subject to change relative to the thoughts, opinions and feelings of the group or the group’s leaders.  Conversely, any non-religious group in which it is possible for the participants to experience something akin to the authentic Christian experience, do so because of adherence to fundamental truths of the nature of the human person and found most fully revealed in Christianity.

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Today the Church is reminding us that we have been created for something greater than passing comforts, empty pleasures, superficial popularity, and earthly achievements. We all want our lives to matter, to make a lasting difference in this world, not just a passing difference, a little scratch on the surface. But do we all want to live fully and faithfully under Christ's rule, firmly entrusting our lives into his care so that we can all reach our God given potential to make the world a better place, living in the imitation of Christ the King, experience fulfillment of purpose and the interior peace that follows. 
 
Jesus came to inaugurate among us the Kingdom of God. It is he himself who embodies the whole vision of the Kingdom by the way he lived, spoke, worked, taught, healed, liberated, and finally sacrificed his life in love for us.  He is our model, the one we are to imitate. There is no other who so completely reveals to us the truth of who we are and who we were made to become.
 
Colossians tells us that before all, he existed, and it is he holds it all together, sustains and supports the unity of creation. In him, we gain our freedom, through the forgiveness of our sins.  By him who frees us from the power of darkness, we are brought into his Kingdom to live freely what we now see clearly is our true identity. It is in him, the first-born of all creation that we see the image of the unseen God and ourselves. 
 
Yet, we find it so difficult to remain free and faithful. We are all too willing to hide who we are, what we believe and find that too easily we cede our influence to the knowing and the ignorant minions of the enemy. Bombarded by media messages that tell us to keep our religion to ourselves and out of the public square we effectively allow the world to be ruled by the shadow masters. If we truly believe that Christ is the Savior, that there really is one God who created us and redeemed us, we should not be afraid to bring that faith to action in the society around us. If we don't, others will fill the void. 
 

• If we don't defend and spread Christian values in society, what values will thrive there?
• If we don't continue to bring Christ into culture, what will culture become?

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Being a Christian means being led by the Holy Spirit into the fullness of our identity as children of God, and becoming a true reflection of Christ.  To be Christ like is to live like Christ, for the Kingdom, using our intellect and will to freely make choices defined by Love of God and Love of Neighbor.  To love God fully and completely is to love like Christ, ourselves and our neighbor. 
 
Because we live in a world which praises achievements, material wealth, status and superficial beauty above all else, the life of a missionary disciple takes perseverance, as St. Paul says to Timothy in the second reading. 
 
The rich man in Gospel this morning wasn’t an axe-murderer, mafia boss, or the head of a human trafficking ring. He had no particularly damaging "sins of commission”, at least none pointed out by Jesus in the parable. He was a pretty good guy, it would seem. And yet, he failed to enter into eternal life. Why? Because of his "sins of omission". Day after day, he closed his heart to a neighbor who was in dire need of help.
 
We, followers of Christ can be just as deeply infected with the secular ideals, values and ethics as the folks who aren't people of faith, even when it comes to life in the Church. Our way of living our faith can be very individualistic and self-centered. We can over emphasis personal salvation being 'self made' morally good people. Meaning we basically avoid actions which are ethically wrong, such as, failing to worship God in the “official” way, committing violent actions against others, behaving in a sexually immoral way, stealing things from people, gossiping maliciously about others, being jealous, envious, angry, resentful and so on. 

We must be more than ‘a good person’ as compared to others, but rather to be ‘good’ with God as our measure.

God told the Hebrews to be ready. He also told them when. Jesus tells us to be ready. But says the timing will be unexpected. Christ’s message today is to live each day as a preparation to meet him with joy.  Semper Paratus: Always Ready.

Consider the 'getting ready / being ready' in the context of how we order and approach each individual day and how this ought to be similar to how the Priest makes ready the Altar for the Sacrifice. Our lives can and ought to be an altar of praise to God, an altar which is prepared and made holy, daily.  Approaching our day in this way requires that we pray as we begin, ensure we are ready for the fullness of graces through an examination and seeking the necessary reconciliation. It requires mindful attentiveness to the presence of God and personal intentionality about entering into today with God. We will need to be reverent as we prepare to live the gift of life today and continue to be reverent as we celebrate the gifts of each moment. Know what it is we are offering to God and have certainty of faith about that which God is offering to us. 

Essential to being able to do this everyday with greater love, wisdom, power and strength, is our full and active participation in the celebration of Mass, at least every weekend and the worthy reception of the Eucharist. In the Mass we receive the strength and the courage to live always ready. In the Mass we receive the assurance that God is close to us, and that he wants to help us to truly love. In the Mass we are brought into unity with others, and we recognize that they are worthy of our love and sacrifice.

To the repentant person Moses said, "If only you would heed the voice of the LORD, your God, and keep his commandments and statutes with all your heart and all your soul.”  Echoing the words, he had first said to the Israelites who were about to enter the promised land, “Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” And he encouraged them about doing this, as he said, "For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out."{that is, memorized and recited; And in your heart: internalized and appropriated}
 
The core of the Christian message is faith as total trust in God and his message, which comes through Christ and love as the driving power of all our actions and relationships. We cannot love ourselves, our neighbors or God, as God intends, without faith. This faith, as the Apostle James says in his Letter: “without good works is dead”, in other words, faith without active love is empty of the divine life of God animating it. It is good to be appropriately sensitive to orthodoxy, about thinking and saying the right thing in conformity with the Church’s teaching, but orthopraxis necessarily follows upon orthodoxy. Faith that does not express itself in love is Pharisaism. 
 
In the Gospel reading a ‘scholar of the law’ approaches Jesus. Now, when you encounter the word “lawyer” in Scripture, concentrate on the “law” root. The “law” here is the Mosaic Law, the codified system of rules and regulations meant to govern Israel in God’s ways as the nation lived in the Promised Land. The suffix “–er” means “one who practices.” A “lawyer,” therefore, was an expert or scholar of the Mosaic Law. When the ‘Scholar of the Law’ brought his question to Jesus he knew the answer was in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The living Word of God is clear that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind, and that we must love our neighbors as ourselves.  By that time, these verses had already been combined in Jewish thought and had indeed been considered to be the foundation of the whole Torah.  But it is the second part of that question that gives Jesus the opportunity to further open the mind of the Lawyer beyond how he and many others understood meaning of ‘who is my neighbor’.  
 
Leviticus 19 opens with an imperative addressed “to all the congregation of the people of Israel …: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”. In Jewish thought, Leviticus 19, and indeed the whole Torah, is addressed to the congregation of the people of Israel only. Therefore, the commandment to “love your neighbor” – both in the original context and in later Jewish interpretations – is inevitably restricted to members of this congregation.   In this context ‘neighbor’ (rea) refers to a person encountered within the framework of covenantal relationships. As well, in Hebrew the words “neighbor” (rea) and “evil [one]” (the word that can also designate “an enemy”) share the same consonants: רע (resh and ayin). The difference is only in the vowels, which were not in the text. Therefore, when in the parable Jesus asks the lawyer, “What do you read there?”he is asking, ‘Are you able to see, in the words of the Torah, the command to love both neighbor (narrowly defined) and those you would see as enemies?  Thus, if we think of Jesus as one who “did not come to destroy but to fulfill” the Law, we will see that his use of Leviticus 19:18, and his understanding of the neighbor, however challenging it was for his listeners, was still based on the Torah.  Love for God and neighbor must serve as the basis for any ethics.
 
A key word, twice used in the parable, is “compassion”. In fact, the verb used to express the feelings of the Samaritan for the victim lying on the road is the same as that used to describe Jesus’ compassion for the crowd, when he described them as “like sheep without a shepherd”.  We are to understand that the neighbor is the one “who shows mercy”, one who can show real compassion to a total stranger in need, unconditionally and without moral judgement.
 
Looking back to the dialogue between Jesus and the Lawyer, the newness and shock of this parable will escape a non-Jewish reader, but it is important to understand that “Jews generally then, and now, fit into one of three groups: priests (kohanim) descended from Aaron; Levites (levi’im) descended from other children of Levi; and Israelites, descended from the children of Jacob other than Levi. The citation in the parable of the first two anticipates the mention of the third.” After priest and Levite in this story, a first-century Jew would have expected mention of someone from the third group—an Israelite. However, the third person in the parable is not the expected Israelite, but an unexpected Samaritan – the enemy of the Jews, so Jesus parable would have seemed outrageous to his Jewish audience. Not only is the appearance of this Samaritan absolutely striking, but the fact that this Samaritan expressed compassion and care to his supposed enemy, while the priest and the Levite fail to provide help for their supposed neighbor, directly challenges the contemporary Jewish interpretation of the word “neighbor”. Thus, not only continuity, but also the newness of Jesus’ teaching, is evident here.
 
The parable of the Good Samaritan allows us, above all, to see in Jesus the fulfillment of the law regarding love / compassion to others, pre-eminently seen in and what Jesus has done for us - for the human family as a whole, and for each of us individually. We were like the man left on the side of road to die. Each of us has been robbed of our original holiness by original sin.  Our selfishness and sins, and the sins of others, have deeply wounded our souls. We lay on the side of life's path in need of a Savior.  We have been bruised and broken and wounded by life in a fallen world. In his incarnation, Jesus comes to us like the Good Samaritan. He is the merciful Lord who heals and restores us with the oil and wine of his sacraments, who pays for our salvation with his own sacrifice on the cross at Calvary, who entrusts the boundless riches of his grace to his own innkeeper, the Church, who in turn watches over our convalescence, our growth into Christian maturity, until Jesus will come again.
 
Through the first and the Gospel reading Christ reveals man to man’s self by showing us in his example, the way of love which is the necessary fruit of faith. St Paul, in the Second Reading, proclaims that Jesus is "the image of the invisible God." He is God, our Creator, who has become like us in all things but sin, so that we, in our fallen state, can recognize how Jesus reveals to us his own divine nature as God, who is love. Jesus is God the Father's own self-image, so perfect and complete that it shares the Father's very divinity and exists as a distinguishable Person, the eternal Son.
 
In the sixteen-hundreds a series of visions was shared with a humble French nun, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. In these visions Christ revealed his ‘Sacred Heart’ and by which revelation he communicated about his love for us expressed in both his divine and human natures. These visions were the beginning of the famous devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When he first appeared to St Margaret Mary, he stood in front of her and showed her his heart, describing it as a furnace of love.  Then he reached out and took her heart in his hands.  She saw her heart as if it were a tiny little atom.  Jesus put it inside his own heart, where it caught fire and started to burn with the flames of his love.  On another occasion, he allowed her to look directly at his heart. She wrote later that it was as bright as the sun and as clear as crystal.  Driven into the top of it was a cross.  On one side was a deep gash - the wound he had received on Calvary when the soldiers thrust a spear into his side.  Wrapped tightly around the middle of his heart was a ring of thorns.  Jesus explained that these thorns were the indifference and ingratitude that he received from the men and women whom he loved, for whom he had died, for whom he had become the world's Good Samaritan.
 
“Love your neighbor as yourself” The next really important question that rises from this parable and the Laws in which it is rooted: How am I to love myself?

Like the young man who asked Mother Teresa ‘what can I do?’, we to have to start somewhere if we have not been very engaged in the ministry of the mission.  Some of us may be aware that we’re no longer gifted for what we have been doing but don’t know what else we could do. Many, like the young man will be sadden and discouraged by felling like they cannot single-handedly convert or change the world!  For all of us, the important thing is to allow the Holy Spirit to stir up our courage, to help us discern our path and to seek to become strong and able. We can follow the example of someone like St Teresa of Calcutta who realized that there were thousands and thousands of the poor, destitute and dying who needed her immediate help. But she started with just one at a time.
 
Christ called 12 Apostles, appointed seventy-two disciples from among many, to collaborate in his mission.  We must never think that we are alone in the mission field.  We may not see the other missionaries engaged in the way that we are or want to be, but they are out there in fields, and they are at home and in Church as prayer partners for the missionaries.  Most of all, Christ is with every one of them. The Holy Spirit is empowering all the missionaries in their ministries of love.
 
This is the pattern of God. God chooses coworkers to help build his Kingdom: he is a team player. Jesus is saving the world, but not all by himself. He wants to do it with our help to keep spreading the announcement to the ends of the earth, until the end of time. From the pope down to the most recently baptized believer, we all share the same mission: to help Christ build up his Kingdom.
 
This should be our greatest joy.
 
As Pope Benedict once wrote: "I am convinced that there is a great need for the whole Church to rediscover the joy of evangelization, to become a community inspired with missionary zeal to make Jesus better known and loved." [Pope's letter to Pan-Asian meeting on culture, organized by Cardinal Paul Poupard, 27 November 2006]
 
So, back to the question, ‘what can I do?’… 

• Do what God calls you to do
• Do the Holy Spirit is tugging at your heart to do.
• Start doing something, and your gifts will lead you to the right thing.
• Remember, the simplest truth about being a missionary disciple is above all to love your neighbor as yourself… right now, today, what does that look like.

One word that occurs in all three readings today is “peace”. Isaiah, in the First Reading, speaks of God sending “flowing peace, like a river”. Paul speaks of the peace and mercy that come to all who become a transformed person in Jesus Christ. And, in the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples to bring peace with them to every house they enter. 
 
In the Second Reading, Paul, speaking to the Galatians, says that it doesn’t matter if a person is circumcised or not. Paul is referencing a concern that was a problem in some of the communities he evangelized, because there were Judaizers who firmly believed that if Gentiles were to ‘convert’ they should still be held accountable to Jewish laws.  But there is also a deeper truth that is universally applicable to all who become disciples of Christ. Ours is a faith that necessitates transformation. Jesus calls us as we are. God loves us as we are. But, unless I am on the way to becoming a genuinely transformed person in the image of Jesus, then my baptism and all my other religious experiences will have little salvific value.  Meaning, that a baptized person who is living a life of unrepented sin, isn’t going to heaven just because he’s baptized.  St. Paul also dealt with that issue among the Corinthians.
 
As Christians we ought to be bringers of peace. But we need that peace and inner security first within ourselves.  Becoming a child of God through baptism is simply the only way, of becoming a new creation, an altogether person that Jesus and Paul speak about. This new person acquires a deep sense of both God’s utter transcendence and utter immanence, the God who constantly calls us beyond where we are and who, at the same time, deeply penetrates our being and our every experience. This new person, responding to the universal call to holiness, strives in Christ to live a life of increasingly perfect integrity and truth, a life of deep compassion and concern. This new person lives in freedom and abiding interior peace. It is a peace that a close following of Jesus can bring. 
 
In today’s Gospel, Jesus recommends his disciples not to weigh themselves down with all kinds of baggage. Missionaries need to be reliant on God, they need to trust God.  They must be detached from material processions. In other words, material possessions cannot occupy an inappropriate importance to them.  As well, on a deeper level, the best missionaries are in fact free and at peace. That doesn’t mean that we are not ‘works in progress’ but that we are striving to be like Christ in this way and be able to reflect the glory of God freely and fully as we give witness and testimony of the saving truths of our faith in the mission field, bringing peace to every house we enter.
 
In a world that seems so rich and prosperous and yet is so impoverished of the security and peace it so frenetically seeks to find; we are called to become laborers with Jesus in the harvest. We are called today to labor so that our society may be gradually transformed into a place where the values of the Gospel, often so little understood even by ourselves, will prevail.
 
Be an oasis of peace for others in the missionary field to which you are called.

Like the Israelites, Jews and Christians who came before us, the members of the family of God have been a community that lives within a larger community of people for whom God, in practice hardly exists. We live among people who don’t understand from whom their inherent dignity and value come and subsequently seek to find their meaning and identity from myriad other current secular ideals, things, or philosophies. Unlike the disciple of Christ, they more often than not seem to have little direction and meaning in their lives beyond having a job, getting money, excelling at achieving social status and indulging in some level of enjoyment. For God’s family members, in the past as well as today, the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel passage have great depth of meaning: “The harvest is great, and the laborers are few.” 
 
At the time of Christ, there were an estimated 170 million people in the world and by the end of the first century there were approximately 80,000 followers of Christ. Today there are 8 billion people in the world. Of that 8B there are almost 2.5 billion Christians and of those, 1.3B are Catholic, 75% of North America is Christian, 73% of the United States is Christian and of those there are 75.4 M Catholics. The ancient believers clearly did not labor in vain. 
 
However, looking at belief in God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; 3 of 4 people have not yet heard or believed, a large proportion of which is agnostic or are practical atheists – they live their lives as if God did not exist. And how many who once knew Christ have subsequently rejected the faith?
 
As well, among so many who do call themselves Christians, how many could be accurately described as being actively engaged in the mission, laborers in the field bringing in the harvest?  Too often, by “laborer” Catholics think of priests, or religious brothers and sisters. One hears people expressing regret that today there are so few “vocations”. What will the Church do? How will it carry on? We should become like the protestant churches; we should have married and women priests. But in the early days and years of the Church, there were very few priests or religious. In the mind of Jesus – and in the mind of the early evangelists – everyone who was known as a follower of Christ was expected to be a laborer in the harvest field. Paul was a layman and made his living as a tentmaker.
 
All of us are called to be Christ's coworkers in the vineyard, missionaries of his mercy, peace, and love.  Some of us are called to dedicate ourselves in sacramental and apostolic ways to this spiritual harvest, but for the most part when Jesus admonishes us to "ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest", he is referring above all to the vast majority of disciples who are not Priests and Religious missionaries.
 
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta was once speaking with a young man who wanted to do something for Christ. He was saddened by the problems he saw in the world and expressed his frustration to Mother Teresa. He told her, "I'm only one person, and the world is in such a mess! What can I do?" She answered, "Pick up a broom." 
 
Living our faith as missionaries is not just an expectation of God for us, it isn’t one more rule, sharing faith and the message to repent and believe is above all a corporal work of mercy, a labor that brings greater peace into the hearts of human beings and therefore the world, and it is an act of love for neighbor – our loving responses to God’s love for us. The Kingdom of God is at hand.
 
Let the peace of Christ control your hearts; let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Let all the earth cry out with joy!

Getting to know Christ, we come to know how we ought to BE...

In this reading from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is continuing to give his first major sermon in the foothills of the mountains of Galilee, in a grassy meadow surrounded by what Luke calls a "great crowd". He paints a simple, but powerful portrait of himself and so too then, of you and I as well.
 
Nothing limits his generosity and love - nothing.  If we are ungrateful to him, he is still generous with us.  If we oppose him, disobey him, insult him, abandon him - he keeps on loving us.  He simply doesn't give up on us. 
 
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. If we are truly like him, "Your reward will be great!" "Gifts will be given to you, overflowing, will be poured into your lap!"  That's the kind of God we serve.  One who has no limits on his generosity, no limits on his love.  One who is always looking for more ways to shower us with his goodness.  That's our Lord.
 
Loving one’s enemies, not the destruction of the wrongdoer. 

• is not being soppy about them. 
• Nor is it about peace at any price, 
• not a question of projecting a gentle, loving image 
• but a passion to restore justice, dignity and right relationships between people. 

 
The authentic Christian is nothing else but a follower of Christ, another Christ, in fact.  So as he describes the characteristics of a Christian, Jesus indirectly gives us a portrait of himself; he shows us what kind of Lord he really is - a lavish one.

• love your enemies, 
• do good to those who hate you, 
• bless those who curse you, 
• pray for those who mistreat you. 
• To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and 
• from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. 
• Give to everyone who asks of you, and 
• from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back. 
• Do to others as you would have them do to you. 
• Stop judging and you will not be judged.
• Stop condemning and you will not be condemned
• Forgive and you will be forgiven
• Give, and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”