31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B

In today's Gospel (Mark 12:28b-34), Jesus gives us the two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.... You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In his Treatise on the Love of God, St Francis de Sales says that:

Good Samaritan (1890), Vincent Van Gogh

Because God created us in his own image and likeness, he ordained that our love for one another should be in the image and likeness of the love we owe him, our God.... What is our reason for loving God? God himself is the reason we love him; we love him because he is the supreme and infinite goodness. What is our reason for loving ourselves? Surely because we are the image and likeness of God. And since all men and women possess this same dignity we love them as ourselves, that is, as holy and living images of the Godhead.

It is as such that we belong to God through a kinship so close and a dependence so lovable that he does not hesitate to call himself our Father, and to name us his children. It is as such that we are capable of being united to him in the fruition of his sovereign goodness and joy. It is as such that we receive his grace and that our spirits are associated with his most Holy Spirit and rendered, in a sense, “sharers in the divine nature.”