God always answers our prayer. Either He changes the circumstances, or He supplies sufficient power to overcome
them.
--Anonymous
(Mostly the second, it seems . . . but that's OK . . . no?) |
RU 1:1, 3-6, 14B-16, 22; PS 146:5-6AB, 6C-7, 8-9A, 9BC-10
MT 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law, tested him by asking,
"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
He said to him,
"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
Reflection on the
Scriptures |
Today’s first reading demonstrates Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law,
Naomi. The Psalm is a statement of confidence in God as the source of strength and protection. The well-known Gospel redirects the focus of the 10 commandments into two more fundamental commandments.
I notice that Jesus is changing the way that we view the commandments. Of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, 8 are prohibitions (Thou shalt not …) and only 2 are more open-ended directives. Jesus gives
two new commandments that are both of this open-ended type. When I go back to the today’s first reading, Ruth is doing the right thing. It is not something that she is required to do under the law. She is living out what Jesus will eventually ask.
- by Mike Cherney Revelations of Divine
Love - by Julian of Norwich
Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 41
I am the Ground of thy
beseeching. Full glad and merry is our Lord of our prayer; and He looketh thereafter and He willeth to have it because with His grace He maketh us like to Himself in condition as we are in kind: and so is His blissful will. Therefore He saith thus: Pray inwardly, though thee thinketh it savour thee not:
for it is profitable, though thou feel not, though thou see nought; yea, though thou think thou canst not. For in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in feebleness, then is thy prayer well-pleasant to me, though thee thinketh it savour thee nought but little. And so is all thy believing prayer in my sight. For the meed and the endless thanks that He will give us, therefor He is covetous to have us pray continually in His sight. God accepteth the goodwill and the travail of His servant,
howsoever we feel: wherefore it pleaseth Him that we work both in our prayers and in good living, by His help and His grace, reasonably with discretion keeping our powers [turned] to Him, till when that we have Him that we seek, in fulness of joy: that is, Jesus. And that shewed He in the Fifteenth [Revelation], farther on, in this word: Thou shalt have me to thy meed. |
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