30th Sunday In Ordinary Time | 29 October 2023 | Gospel Matthew 22 : 34 -40| Sunday Reflections

“Great indeed are your works O Lord, now and evermore.” How right this song is when it says that God’s works are great? To whom do we attribute the word “great”? Or what would we call “great”? Greatness is a quality that can be attributed to an animate or an inanimate object. To call someone or something great would mean that the person, object, event or an accomplishment is worth recognizing and appreciating. In other words, the quality of being “great” is accompanied with honor, joy and the feeling of being valued or of worth. All of us have questions as to what or who could be great. As kids we believed in famous cartoon characters like tarzan, ninja, powerpuff girls, spiderman, batman and so on. As we grow older, we make a shift from cartoon characters to people whom we admire the most. We fill our room with their photos and dream of becoming like them. With our little minds we think that if we walk, talk or act like them, we automatically become great like them. And in the process we become their fans and follow them very closely. But does that make us great? Let us figure it out. Jesus in today’s gospel has an interesting answer with regard to the greatest commandment in the Law. Anyone who would aspire to be great would definitely ask for tips to be so. Similarly, the lawyer in the gospel after witnessing the way Jesus silenced the Sadducees asked him which was the greatest commandment. Being a lawyer and a scripture scholar, he definitely knew the answer. But he wanted to know Jesus’ approach to the Law, in other words, the greatest or the most important Law. Jesus wisely answered that the greatest commandment was to love God above everything else and to love our neighbor as ourselves. According to Jesus, love is like 2 sides of the same coin where we love God and love those whom come across. Love is what makes us great. When we truly believe in God’s love with our whole being, we are able to do what he desires and we are able to love those who hurt us. Love has the power to break barriers and love when practiced according to Jesus’ terms bears fruit in abundance. Jesus’s notion of greatness is something different, something unheard of. Everybody wants to be great. We go helter-skelter to become great. And in the process of becoming great, we keep success as our priority and in the course of time we trample upon others and we think that we have accomplished everything. Some of us are of the notion that we need to be daring in order to be great. We adopt dangerous strategies, sometimes by even compromising on our values and our very lives as well. And guess what. We have become great by forgetting our parents and loved ones who took care of us and brought us up, the friends we had, the social groups we were involved in, the places we enjoyed visiting and so on. In the process of becoming great and successful, we have lost our very lives and wonder if life is worth living. Jesus in today’s gospel is asking us to understand the true meaning of greatness. Greatness doesn’t mean tampering upon others but it means building everyone up. Greatness in Jesus’ terms would mean loving God to the extent of expressing our experience of God’s love to all those we meet. And when we do that we automatically become great because great things happen when God mixes with us. We are able to understand the what, when, why, where and the how of things. We are also able to perceive everything in the positive light and are able to accept suffering or defeat with gusto. As we delve deeper and deeper let us ask ourselves a couple of questions. What does it mean to be great? What is our topmost priority? Is success, money, name, fame, aceing in all subjects, promotions, bank balance our number one priority? And in the course of aspiring to be great have we forgotten Jesus’ call of loving God and loving our neighbor? Lastly, how can we grow in our ability to love God and love our neighbor? God has a very unique way of bringing us back on track. He has a way of conveying to us the most important commandment of all – to love God and to love our neighbor, and on these two commandments depends the whole law and the prophets. Let us revisit our concept of being great and grow in true greatness. Pauline Sisters are canonically the Daughters of St Paul, a congregation of Pontifical right, founded in 1915. Our mission is to proclaim the Gospel using the means of communication available. We print and publish books, booklets, cards, mini-media in hard format and also in e-format. On Youtube you can subscribe to our channel... here where you are watching and get our videos , also from our other channel https://paulineindia.org/ Pauline Books and Media https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbOj... On Facebook,   / pauline.india   On Twitter   / paulinesindia   Pinterest   / paulinesindia   Instagram   / paulinesist.  .