Angelus – November 4, 2012 – On God's Love

 

            Reflecting upon this Sunday's Gospel, Matthew 12:28-34, the Holy Father spoke about our Lord's great commandment to love God and our neighbor.  He reminds us that the saints are those who, by trusting in the grace of God, seek to live this law. 

            In his address, Pope Benedict XVI twice used the example of the relationship of parents with their children.  He stated, “The commandment of love can be put fully into practice by those who live in a deep relationship with God, precisely in the way that a child becomes capable of living through a good relationship to his mother and father”.  Again, he further comments, “If God's love has sunk deep roots in a person, he is able to love even those who do not merit this love, just as God loves us.  Fathers and mothers do not love their children only when they merit it: they love them always, even if, of course, they make them understand when they have made mistakes”. 

            The Holy Father teaches that above all love is a gift.  It something we all can know and experience, and it can grow and develop in our own lives.  It is a self-giving without thinking about the cost, a reaching out to the other without caving in upon oneself.  He states,

 

We learn to look upon others not only with our own eyes but with the gaze of God, which is the gaze of Jesus Christ.  It is a look that comes from the heart and does not stop at the surface; it goes beyond appearances and succeeds in grasping the expectations of the other: of being listened to, of being gratuitously attended to; in a word, of being loved.  But there is also the inverse path: opening myself to the other as he is, reaching out to him, making myself available, I open myself also to knowing God, to knowing that he exists and that he is good.

 

            Further, the Holy Father spoke about how the love of God and the love of neighbor are inseparably related.  Jesus did not invent this, but revealed it by His words and, above all, by His actions.  “In the Eucharist he grants us a twofold love, giving us himself, so that, nourished by this Bread, we love each other as he loved us.”  He ends asking, through the intercession of the Blessed Mother, that we may know how to show our faith with a clear witness of love of neighbor.  Blessed Mother, pray for us!