St. Norbert's Church - Sunday Reflections

The Gospel from Saint Luke today tells us so much about God's love for us. The first reading, from the Book of Exodus, tells us a bit about our own role in loving one another. These two readings speak so much about love.

Let us begin with the first reading. God is presented as very angry at His people. Yet the great Moses is able to talk God out of destroying His own people. If we look closely at this reading, we can reflect on our personal lives. Moses had gone up the mountain to pray and was away for a good length of time. The people got bored or perhaps they began to think that he would not come down. So the gathered all of their gold jewelry and made an idol of it. This made our God think of rejecting them.

What about us? Do we still get bored when we have to wait on God? Do we still make idols of some type, perhaps of our work, perhaps of our communities, perhaps of our families, etc.? We humans are not the most faithful people! We are so much like our ancestors in the faith.

Yet we are also called to recognize our infidelity and to strive to live with Moses as a model, interceding for one another. We can ask God to spare His people. We can ask God to heal the brokenness of those whom we love. We can ask God to change bad situations into awareness of His love. Certainly we must not refuse to pray for one another and to ask God's gifts to come upon one another. The more we can intercede for all others, the more we can understand God's incredible love for us.

The Gospel gives us three stories to help us understand God and to understand ourselves. The first is the story of the shepherd who so loves his sheep that he will leave 99 sheep and go look for the 1 lost sheep. Then there is the woman with ten coins and who loses one and start a major search for the one lost coin.

There is no way that we could ever think of God's love and care for us as less than our human love and care for one another. God is the shepherd who invites all of us to salvation, without exception. God is the woman who has lost one coin and will spend all of her energy searching for that coin.

God rejoices when the lost sheep is found, when the lost coin is once again in possession of the owner. If God rejoices over such simple things, think of His rejoicing when a human person turns to Him, seeking salvation!

The third story today is the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The three characters are the two sons and the father. The moral of the story is that all of us should rejoice whenever anyone turns to the Lord! It also teaches us to realize that even if we stay with the Father and do not stray, we have to accept the Father's love for everyone and not try to keep it just for ourselves.

Let us pray today that we will always have courage to pray for those who most irritate us, for those who have harmed us, for those who have betrayed us, etc. These are the tests of a genuine Christian love. We are invited to love everyone and to pray for the good of everyone. May it be so in our lives!