Love Summary for the Year: Week 1
Love: Jesus’ Plan
Thursday, December 22, 2016
I’d like to give a simplified summary of what seems to me to be Jesus’ foundational worldview and plan:
God can be trusted. God is like a loving Father or Mother who is involved in our lives and our world. So do not be afraid.
Divine Love has the power to effect lasting and real change. Alignment with such truth is to live under the “Reign of God.” The simple and pure motivation for all morality and religion is simply the imitation of God who is love.
We are transported to this Reign of God through a purifying journey into powerlessness and back. Those who have not gone on such a journey will often misuse divine power. So Jesus taught it directly, walked it through himself, and then invited us to trust this Paschal Mystery in ourselves.
Therefore a disciple needs to learn several lessons:
- To refuse total allegiance (“idolatry”) to all false power, while still working around and with the power structure in service to justice and love.
- To refuse to idealize one’s private self, which props itself up by myths of importance, control, power, money, and wealth.
- To offer ourselves trustfully to a much larger pattern, because our lives are not about us!
The new world order, where love and true power work together, is described by Jesus as a “wedding banquet.” He uses images of meals to illustrate a world that is good, joy-filled, trustworthy, relational, communal, shared, and still local and small-scale or what he calls “where two or three are gathered in my name” (Matthew 18:20).
Gateway to Silence:
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 170-171.
