Mass Readings Audio
https://bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/2020-10-25-usccb-daily-mass-readings

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time – October 25, 2020

Welcome to the one hundred and thirty-fifth episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time. (Cycle A) Tom Brady, when he was the quarterback for the New England Patriots, played in nine Super Bowls and won six of them, both of which are the most of any player in NFL history. For his accomplishments on the field, many refer to him as the GOAT, or greatest of all time. In our Gospel reading on Sunday, Jesus is not asked who is the GOAT, but what is the GOAC, or greatest of all commandments.

He replied, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.” (Mt 22:37-38) Love him with all your heart. Love him with all your soul. Love him with all your mind. Total and complete love is the response to the love God has given us first.

Jesus quickly follows up the GOAC with the second which is like it. He said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:39) There are three important commands in these two great commandments: Love God, love neighbor and love yourself. I’d like to reflect on these in reverse order.

Love Yourself

In my leadership coaching process with my clients, the focus is on the person being coached. It is a process that helps them discover who they are, their strengths and limitations, and how those factors help them or get in their way. You can’t chart a course to where you want to be or who you want to become without clarity of where you are or who you are now. Just look at any mapping app; you can’t get directions just by plugging in the destination. You have to know the starting point.

So, in leadership development, the client’s typical goal is to improve their formal leadership, which is leading others. But you cannot effectively lead others if you cannot lead yourself to set goals that are aligned with your purpose and consistently achieve them.

A pre-requisite to self-leadership is a strong self-image which rests on self-love. Self-love is not selfish. If you do not love yourself, are not comfortable with who you are, your attempts at formal leadership will falter because you cannot truly love another until you know how to love yourself. Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have, in leadership and otherwise.

God loved you into existence. God loves everything about you. Do you believe that? I mean, do you really believe that? If so, it is easy to love yourself… to love what God loves. Do you love yourself?

Love Your Neighbor

Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:39) In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus responds to the scholar of the law who asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” we hear this same quote from Deuteronomy 6:5. But when the man continued “because he wished to justify himself,” saying, “And who is my neighbor?” (Lk 10:29) Jesus shared the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37)

In his most recent encyclical letter on fraternity and social friendship, Fratelli Tutti, the Holy Father, Pope Francis, reflected on the parable saying, “The parable eloquently presents the basic decision we need to make in order to rebuild our wounded world. In the face of so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the Good Samaritan. Any other decision would make us either one of the robbers or one of those who walked by without showing compassion for the sufferings of the man on the roadside.” (FT 67)

In our daily lives, we don’t usually encounter a person on the side of the road who has been beaten by robbers and left half-dead. We might find it easier to show love to this suffering “neighbor” than the person who annoys us at work. These are the people who trigger us to behave in a less than charitable way. Whatever it is that they do, they own it, but we own our response, and the Great Commandment Part 2 says we should love them as we love ourselves.

So, what’s the key to dealing with difficult people who pull our chains? In a word, empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

In our first reading the Lord said, “You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.” (Ex 22:20), reminding us that we should see things from the other person’s perspective. Empathy is a term we use for the ability to understand other people’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves. Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence guru and New York Times best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, said “A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.”

When I’m working with organizations that are experiencing interdepartmental conflict, I encourage them to implement a job shadowing program where individuals from one department spend half a day with someone from the other department learning about each other’s jobs. The objective is for each team member to develop a stronger relationship by spending time together, learning about the challenges the other person faces, and learning how their jobs impact each other from a systemic perspective. The process helps both employees gain a little empathy for each other. According to Stephen Covey, “When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.” And that can only be good for your business.

Focusing on developing your own emotional intelligence is good for you too. As Daniel Goleman said, “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”

Pope Francis expanded on the parable of the Good Samaritan, for it has much to say to us. He wrote,

“An injured man lay on the roadside. The people walking by him did not heed their interior summons to act as neighbors; they were concerned with their duties, their social status, their professional position within society. They considered themselves important for the society of the time, and were anxious to play their proper part. The man on the roadside, bruised and abandoned, was a distraction, an interruption from all that; in any event, he was hardly important. He was a “nobody”, undistinguished, irrelevant to their plans for the future. The Good Samaritan transcended these narrow classifications. He himself did not fit into any of those categories; he was simply a foreigner without a place in society. Free of every label and position, he was able to interrupt his journey, change his plans, and unexpectedly come to the aid of an injured person who needed his help.” (FT 101)

It is far too easy to get caught up with ourselves, our plans, our work that we miss the opportunity to be neighbor to others. But, by failing to pay attention, we miss out on an opportunity for ourselves. Pope Francis emphasizes this point when he wrote, “The parable clearly does not indulge in abstract moralizing, nor is its message merely social and ethical. It speaks to us of an essential and often forgotten aspect of our common humanity: we were created for a fulfilment that can only be found in love.” (FT 68)

And this reflects the beauty of this and all the commandments. To love our neighbor as ourselves is not just for the good of our neighbor, it is good for us and for all of humanity.

Love the Lord Your God

Which brings us back to the Greatest of All Commandments, ““You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Mt 22:37) Again, when Pope Francis reflected on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he wrote, “One detail about the passers-by does stand out: they were religious, devoted to the worship of God: a priest and a Levite. This detail should not be overlooked. It shows that belief in God and the worship of God are not enough to ensure that we are actually living in a way pleasing to God. (FT 74)

Living in a way that is pleasing to God is what we are charged with each time we leave the Mass, to “Go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.” There is no better way to love the Lord and to glorify him than to love what he loves, that is, your neighbor and yourself.

Together, let’s pray: O my God, we love you above all things, with our whole heart and soul, because you are all-good and worthy of all love. Help us to love our neighbors as ourselves for the love of you. Help us to forgive those who have injured us, and we ask pardon for all we have injured. We ask this through Christ our Lord.

May God bless you abundantly this week and may you glorify the Lord by loving God and your neighbor as yourself.

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