CẢM NGHIỆM TÌNH CHÚA YÊU TÔI- CN7TN-C

Details: Category: 14. Cảm Nghiệm Tình Chúa Yêu Tôi

GENEROSITY

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOSPEL (Lk 6: 27-38)

BEING GENEROUS

AS GOD IS GENEROUS

Jesus puts before his disciples the extraordinary command to ‘love your enemies’. He goes on to give some illustrations of what this might mean in practice. All involve responding to injury or to unreasonable demand with nothing but generosity and the abandonment of all claim to recompense.

Take by itself, such behaviour seems contrary to common sense. But Jesus is not laying down maxims to be followed literally. There is a measure of prophetic exaggeration in the example he cites. All flow from a fundamental attitude in which one is prepared to be vulnerable to a degree deemed foolish by the standards of the world, because such vulnerability and is what one both discerns in God and experiences from God.

Jesus tells the disciples, ‘Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate’. The key term here is the little word ‘as’. As children are ‘like’ their parents, so, by loving their enemies, by being compassionate and generous to a ‘foolish’ degree, they will be ‘children of the Most High, who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked’. Such a vulnerable way of life disarms violence and humanises the world.

It has a future effect as well. People who are generous in giving and forgiving open themselves up to even greater divine generosity in return. It is not that God waits to see if we are generous before pouring gifts upon us. But God can only give us what we have the capacity to receive. And the measure of that capacity is our own generosity towards others.

Brendan Byrne, SJ

Generous King [Sovereign Grace Music]:

watch?v=0LXorXGkahM

God Is Generous In Giving:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nRGdbnio2s