Jun 6: Love Ever More Fully

Anonymous Cologne Glazier: Sermon on the Mount
Great Bookham (Bucks.), England, 1460

Monday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

Reading I: 2 Cor 1:1-7

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God (NRSV, 1 Cor 1:3-4).

Father, everything that we are, and everything that we do, have their origin in you. When we console others, it is because we have been empowered to act by the consolation that we ourselves have first received from you.

Jesus, the Word made flesh, in the collection of moral challenges that the evangelists have united into the Sermon on the Mount, summons us to a new and higher form of moral life. The Word, in fact, always present to us in every situation from the very beginning, challenges us always in the moment to live better lives than we have up until that moment. With the challenge inevitably comes the power to act given to us in the Holy Spirit. As we are called to a deeper understanding of love of you, Father, and of our neighbor, and summoned to live out that love, we can only fulfill the calling because you, Father, have first loved us and empowered us with your infinite love. Help us grow in your love, Father, that we in turn may ever love more fully.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.