Monday 11 August 2025
St Clare
Deuteronomy 10:12-22. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem – Ps 147:12-15, 19-20. Matthew 17:22-27.
God’s authentic, loving relationship
In the Reading from Deuteronomy, we see the nascent Gospel. Loving and serving God is not to be some socially disconnected practice, a sort of mutual, solipsistic self-regard. Out of the whole cosmos, ‘it was on your fathers that the Lord set his heart. He loved them . . .’
Already we see that authentic, loving relationship is the purpose of all creation; the startling phrase ‘Circumcise the foreskin of your hearts’ points to it. The consequence of love will be ‘the rights of the orphan and the widow and . . . the alien’. The Chosen People are called to serve the Lord and fear him, where ‘fear’ determines whose command a person truly respects. The person we respect is the God who gives compassionate orders, for who could be more vulnerable than the parentless child, the defenceless widow, and the foreigner with no property or prospects other than what might be given them in tender charity by God’s children?
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