Today we celebrate the culmination of time, and the final manifestation of the glory of Jesus Christ. Throughout our lives we catch glimpses of how God is guiding the course of the world, how He intervenes sometimes in very subtle ways. At the end of time, we will see clearly how intimately involved Jesus was in every movement of every human heart. Jesus is the King of hearts, the shepherd of souls, the new head of humanity – raising us who had fallen in Adam. He is the just judge who will decide if we will rise to share in His glory – fully divinized by His grace – or rise only to plunge deeper into death in hell. He is the merciful judge who draws even closer when we stray. As our head, he proceeds us into heaven – He is a shepherd whose body is composed of sheep. When one is lost or stolen, it is a wound in His flesh that he seeks to heal and recover.
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
JOHN CASSIAN:
When we have made the Lord’s yoke heavy and hard to us, we at once complain in a blasphemous spirit of the hardness and roughness of the yoke itself or of Christ who lays it on us.
MARIUS VICTORINUS:
He has done well to put [the Spirit] third. For the first is to be called in Christ, the next to have love. But when both are true and they have already been called in Christ and enjoy the consolation of loving and being loved, without doubt the fellowship of the Spirit is there.…
CHRYSOSTOM:
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
I think that all of us have tried to loved our enemies – or at least considered in retrospect occasions we could have or should have. An enemy is by definition someone who does wrong – intentionally or unintentionally. We could still consider someone an enemy even if they don’t directly or indirectly wrong our own person. The Gospel does not command us not to have enemies, because we cannot control other people and make them choose to do good always and everywhere. We become the enemies of others when we act selfishly, we are enemies of God by our sin, the fact that we don’t want to consider anyone an enemy doesn’t mean we don’t have any. Joseph didn’t want to be the enemy of his brothers, David didn’t want to be the enemy of Saul, etc.