Thursday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time
Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 10:12-22; Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; John 15:10-16
Who
is a stranger, as a saying goes, but a friend we have yet to meet? Today the
Book of Deuteronomy sets down the Lord’s basic requirements for faithful
living: “Fear the Lord your God… walk in all his ways… love him… serve the Lord
your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and… keep the commandments
of the Lord your God.”
To
love and to fear (as in to show reverence toward) God is, once again in
Deuteronomy, connected with love for one another. And who are the people God
asks through Moses whom we are to love and to attend to their needs and basic
dignity especially? We cannot claim to be worshipping God rightly if we do not
especially uphold the dignity of the most vulnerable among us. God, we hear,
“executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and… loves the strangers.” So
God, through Moses, commands the people, “You shall also love the
stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This “preferential
option” of God, if we might call it that, toward the orphan, the widow, and the
stranger is one of the most common motifs of the social justice teaching of the
Old Testament.
Throughout not only
Deuteronomy but the whole Old Testament, the measure of our love for God is how
we love and care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. In John’s Gospel,
from which we hear today, though, the standard of love of God and of one
another is not so much (at least on the surface) our care for the orphan, the
widow, and the stranger— the people among us most in need of our care— but
friendship. Jesus says to his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends… I do not call you servants any longer…
but I have called you friends.”
And so what are the connections
between care for those most in need of our love and our care, captured in the
motif of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger in the Old Testament, right
worship of God, and being “friends” of Jesus and of one another, ready to lay
down our lives for our “friends”?
We see these connections in
the life of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan priest, missionary, and martyr
of Auschwitz whose feast we celebrate today. In July 1941, three prisoners tried
to escape Auschwitz, so that the camp commander randomly selected ten men to be
starved to death. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the
men, Franciszek Gajowoniczek, who was married and had children. Maximilian
Kolbe’s words to the commander were remembered, if not ever written down precisely:
“I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would
like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.”
Maximilian Kolbe took the place of
Gajowoniczek, who had been a stranger to him, a numbered prisoner of Auschwitz
as Kolbe was. Though Kolbe’s martyrdom, Gajowoniczek became to Kolbe no longer a
beloved stranger but a friend. And it was Kolbe’s regard for the dignity of a
stranger, as God commands of us, that made him the ultimate friend, of God and
of all of us, for “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.”
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