Loving Others for God’s Sake

One

Loving Others for God’s Sake

We’ve been reflecting on how the Christian life isn’t just supposed to be about us. It’s not just about our happiness, our peace, our salvation. Because it’s a relationship with God, and a relationship should never be just one-sided.

Charity is the virtue by which we live our lives in order to please God, to make Him happy, to console Him and make up for all the ingratitude and indifference and even hatred that He receives from humanity.

So our prayer should be about Him. Our sacrifices should be offered as reparation to Him. Our good deeds should be done out of a desire not just to get to Heaven or enjoy the happiness that comes with virtue, but as a way of showing our love for Our Lord and Our Father.

That’s also true of the way we love our neighbor. We should love our neighbor, but we are also called to do it out of a love for God.

Two

Jesus encouraged us to love other people for His sake. 

When Jesus explained what the Last Judgement will be like, he said, 'When the Son of Man comes in his glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take his seat on his throne of glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.”

The goats who ignored the needs of their brothers were surprised to find that they had been ignoring Jesus.

And Our Lord said to them, "Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me." "I tell you solemnly, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me".  

And the sheep who had been generous to the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, they found that they had been generous to Christ the whole time and their reward was eternal life. So who in your life is needy? 

One thing the needy have in common: They tend to feel like annoyances, like people who just suck out our time and energy and have nothing to show for it afterward.

It can be hard to love those people. But charity sees Jesus in them. It sees the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the Savior of the World, the One who died out of love for us. 

If we really practice seeing Jesus in the needy, we’ll jump at the opportunity to serve Him in them. As Mother Teresa said, we’ll see “Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poor.” And we’ll race to love them.

Three

Christ in the Church

Another group that Jesus identified Himself with was His Church. He said to the Apostles, “Whoever receives you receives Me,” and He said to his missionary disciples, “Whoever hears you hears Me.”

Saul, who became St Paul, when He was persecuting the Church, was astonished to find He was persecuting the Lord of Heaven. But when he saw a light from Heaven and fell to the ground he heard Jesus ask Him directly, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

Sometimes it’s hard to love the Church. Sometimes it’s particularly hard to love the Church’s representatives. But Jesus said that those who received them received Him. Jesus said that those who persecuted the Church persecuted Him.

So we love the Church. We support the Church financially. We pray for the hierarchy. We resist any urge to criticize and become resentful or even hateful to the men who represent the Lord on earth. Why do we do all this? Just one, simple, inescapable reason. Because we love Jesus, and Jesus is present in the Church and in its leadership.

Four

Loving those who are dear to those you love

Do you remember, as a kid, ever being helped out by one of your parent’s friends? Or have you ever been willing to have coffee with a stranger, just because a mutual friend asked you to? Have you ever had one of your children do something nice to a younger sibling because they knew it would make you happy?

We do this sort of thing all the time. We reach out to help somebody because of our love for someone else who loves them. This is charity for neighbor. It’s where we encounter someone who normally wouldn’t really have any claim on us and we are kind to them, generous to them, and especially forgiving to them. Because we know God loves them deeply. Jesus is especially present in the needy and in the Church. And so we know that by loving them we are loving Him.

But at the end of the day, Jesus loves everyone. And so anytime we love anyone, we can do it out of love for Him because we know it delights Him to see one person He loves being good to another person He loves.  

Five

Loving God by loving others

So many people don’t know how to show their love for God but it’s simple. Charity for God normally takes the form of love for our neighbor.

As St. John says, “Anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (I John 4:20-21)

St. Augustine sums it up beautifully, “Behold, ‘God is love.’ Why do we rush to the heights of heaven, the depths of the earth, in search of the One who is near to us, if we would be near to him? Let no one say, ‘I don’t know what to love.’ Let him only love his brother, and he will be loving this same love.” (de Trinitate 8).

It’s not complicated. Go love God. Serve Him. Make Him happy. And the way you do that is to love your neighbor.

Sometimes the hardest neighbors to love are those we live with or are part of our family. Start there!