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The Perspective of Justice
4th Sunday of Ordinary Time
January 29, 2017
Gerald Darring

Justice and Love

Today’s liturgy is about love: help us to love you with all our hearts and to love all persons as you love them.

It is also about justice: we are to seek justice, following the Lord, who secures justice for the oppressed,” (Responsorial Psalm) and following Christ, whom God has made “our wisdom and also our justice.” (Second Reading)

But God’s love and justice are different from ours.

The Gospel teaches us that in the just world of God, the sorrowing are consoled, the lowly inherit the land, the hungry have their fill, and the persecuted rejoice at being insulted and slandered.

The children of God are different from the children of the world: 

God chose those whom the world considers absurd to shame the wise; he singled out the weak of this world to shame the strong. He chose the world’s lowborn and despised, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who were something. (Second Reading)

The love of God is more powerful than all the sin we can muster, and the justice of God overcomes all the world’s injustice, its poverty and hunger, its oppression and war, its alienation and domination of others. “The Lord sets captives free.” (Responsorial Psalm)

May we be saved by the Lord’s love.

  “Christian love of neighbor and justice cannot be separated. For love implies an absolute demand for justice, namely a recognition of the dignity and rights of one’s neighbor.

Justice attains its inner fullness only in love.

Because every man is truly a visible image of the invisible God and a brother of Christ, the Christian finds in every man God himself and God’s absolute demand for justice and love.”

Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World, 1971: 34


Gerald Darring
Now published in book form, To Love and Serve: Lectionary Based Meditations, by Gerald Darring This entire three year cycle is available at Amazon.com.
Art by Martin Erspamer, OSB
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and C).
This art may be reproduced only by parishes who purchase the collection in book or CD-ROM form. For more information go http://www.ltp.org