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The Perspective of Justice
The Fifth Sunday
in Ordinary Time B
February 4, 2018
Gerald Darring
Healing Love

On the one hand, there are suffering human beings like Job, slaves longing for the shade. On the other hand, there is God who cares about us, who heals the brokenhearted and sustains the lowly. Jesus comes into this world of suffering as God the healer: Those whom he cured were many.

The community of the followers of Jesus has a calling to bring healing to this world full of suffering. They are to go about this by means of service: just as Simon’s mother-in-law did, they are to use their healing from Jesus as an opening to serve others. They are to be like Paul, making themselves all things to all people, the slaves of all.

The Catholic Church challenges us to hunger and thirst for what is right so that, like God, we might fill the hungry with good things.

Especially through his life-style and through his actions, Jesus revealed that love is present in the world in which we live—an effective love, a love that addresses itself to man and embraces everything that makes up his humanity.

This love makes itself particularly noticed in contact with suffering, injustice and poverty—in contact with the whole historical ‘human condition,’ which in various ways manifests man’s limitations and frailty, both physical and moral.

Pope John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia,1980: 3.

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