OFFERING PERFECT SACRIFICES OF LOVE

ST. ALBERT THE GREAT, BISHOP, DOCTOR

2 Jn 4-9; Ps 119:1-2,10-11,17-18; Lk 17:26-37

The Perfect Sacrifice of Love

Love is the perfection of faith. But our love of God cannot come without knowledge of God. Hence, we must progress in our knowledge of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Through the week, we have reviewed the family life and cast it in the light of our Christian faith as a vocation to sacrifice. The family is a school of love. If this statement is true, we must also say that we learn about the mystery of Jesus Christ in the family. The Eternal Word took our human nature so that he may recapitulate human life through his sacred humanity. He was conceived by a woman and born into a human family. By placing himself in the human family, Jesus teaches us that the family is a sacred place of God’s revelation. We made this point in our reflection yesterday. Our Lord taught us sacred lessons by everything he did, said, or affirmed by his silence. His life of sacrifice started in the holy family of Nazareth, where he humbly submitted to human authority in obedience to his Father’s will and for his love. His love for his Father made his sacrifice of his life perfect from the very moment of his conception.

Because the Man Jesus Christ was conceived with the beatific vision of God, as hypostatically united with the Eternal Word, his act of love in his self-sacrifice is perfect. Though he came in obedience to the command of his Father, the sacrifice of his will is perfect because of love. John tells us of the commandment of love by which we must live daily. We cannot keep the commandment of love without the knowledge of God gained in Jesus Christ. We have reflected on how the knowledge of God is passively and actively received in the family from the parents to the children and in the faith community, from the older men and women to the younger men and women respectively. By faithfully copying those living the Gospel ahead of us in the Christian community and the family, we grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and the love of the Father. So, we learn to keep the commandment of love from the family. For this, John praises the local church for the faithfulness of her children in keeping the commandment of love. “It has given me great joy to find that your children have been living the life of truth as we were commanded by the Father. I am writing now, dear lady, not to give you any new commandment, but the one which we were given at the beginning, and to plead: let us love one another.” It is the commandment of the Father because he gave us his Son to teach us how. Thus, the sacred humanity of our Lord is our Law or Commandment.

If we are living and not focusing on the lessons given by Jesus Christ, passed on to us through those living the Christian tradition in the family and the local church, then the Day of the Lord will come upon us as a thief in the night. “As it was in Noah’s day, so will it also be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating and drinking, marrying wives and husbands, right up to the day Noah went into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.” We must grow in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ through our eating and drinking, our marriages and religious professions, our buying and selling, planting and building. If this is not happening, then we are not obeying the commandment of love we received from the Father. The implication is that we are not giving way to Christ or laying down our lives for him. That means we are walking the path of perdition and will not be drawn to Christ by love as vultures to carcasses. St. Albert the Great lived as a wise steward in the House of God. He lived and taught the Christian tradition by his way of life. He was born at Lauingen on the Danube, Germany. He studied at Padua and Paris before becoming a Dominican. He discovered St. Thomas Aquinas and prepared him for his future work in the Church, while he was teaching at the University of Paris. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages and helped rediscover Aristotle’s works. He had a great interest in science and astronomy, and gained wide knowledge of many things, which gave him the title of the ‘Universal Doctor.’ He was made the bishop of Regensburg in 1260. He resigned after three years. He worked to secure peace between people and cities. He died in 1280 at Cologne.

Let us pray: O God, who made the Bishop Saint Albert great by his joining of human wisdom to divine faith, grant, we pray, that we may so adhere to the truth he taught, that through progress in learning we may come to deeper knowledge and love of you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.