Pope Angelus: Love for God and
neighbour two faces of same coin
During his Angelus address from St Peter’s Square, Pope
Francis takes his cue from Sunday’s Gospel reading from Mark in which a scribe
asks Jesus "What is the first of all the commandments?
Jesus responds, said the Pope, by quoting the profession of
faith with which every Israelite opens and closes his day and which begins with
the words "Listen, Israel! The Lord our God is the only Lord". It is
from this source, explained the Pontiff, “that the double commandment is
derived for us: "You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and
with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. You shall
love your neighbour as yourself.”
Serve, Forgive, Cultivate
By choosing these two words addressed by God to his people
and putting them together, Pope Francis said that, “Jesus taught once and for
all that love for God and love for one's neighbour are inseparable; indeed,
more than that, they support one another. Even if placed in sequence, they are
the two faces of a single coin: lived together they are the true strength of
the believer! To love God is to live by Him and for Him, for what He is and for
what He does. It means, the Pope continued, “to invest one's energies every day
to be his collaborators in serving our neighbour without reserve, in trying to
forgive without limits and in cultivating relationships of communion and
fraternity.” Pope Francis pointed out that Mark the Evangelist, “does not
bother to specify who the neighbour is…” as it is “not a question of
pre-selecting my neighbour, but of having eyes to see him and a heart to love
him.”
Be more than Christian “service stations”
Today's Gospel, he went on to say, “invites all of us to be
projected not only towards the urgencies of our poorest brothers and sisters,
but above all to be attentive to their need for fraternal closeness, for a
sense of life and for tenderness. This challenges our Christian communities: it
is a question of avoiding the risk of being communities that live by many
initiatives but with few relationships: "service stations" but with
little company, in the full and Christian sense of the term.” The Pope
underlined that “God, who is love, created us out of love, so that we can love
others while remaining united to Him. The two dimensions of love, for God and
for our neighbour, in their unity, characterize the disciple of Christ.”
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