Needy people

We are needy people.  There is nothing wrong with this.  It simply recognizes that we cannot survive without needing something from outside ourselves.  We need nutrition.  We need air to breath.  We need shelter from an environment that is not always congenial to our survival.  If these primal, physiological needs are not met, we cannot survive.  This is true of us, as it is true of all living things here on earth.   

But as humans, we need more.  Unlike plants and animals, we can never be completely satisfied; we can never truly thrive, simply by having our basic physiological needs fulfilled.  We need love.  We need to know that we are loved.  Without this knowledge, we live desperate lives, never truly at peace no matter how well we can feed ourselves and shelter ourselves from the elements.

St. Augustine, whose feast we celebrate today, understood this deeply.  He spent many years restlessly searching for love, and only found it when he recognized the love that God had for him.  He describes this revelation in the opening of his autobiography, “Confessions” – “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

St. John describes this love eloquently in today’s passage from his first letter (1 Jn 4:7-16).  This is a love so great that God gave us his Son as an offering for our sins.  This is a love so great that God gives us his Spirit that we might know that he dwells in us, empowering us to love as he loves us.  This love is pure gift, as it is the very essence of God.  God is love.  There is nothing we need do but accept it.

Yet, we forget that it was a gift.  Our pride kicks in, telling us that we have worked so hard and so well that we have earned this love; we deserve this love.  From there, it is a simple step to believe that we are somehow more deserving, somehow more good, somehow more holy, somehow more loved and more exalted, just somehow more than other people who are obviously somewhat less. 

And when we fall into this trap – the snare of the devil – when we start believing that the titles we bestow on ourselves make us more exalted than others, we have refused God’s great gift of love.  We become like the pagans or the Pharisees and scribes who Jesus is castigating in our passage this morning (Mt 23).  We love only those who love us; we hate those who hate us; we may even kill those who threaten us in any way.  We reject the universal brotherhood and sisterhood that Jesus calls each of us to live in.  We choose hell – living with eternal anxiety and dissatisfaction – when God offers us salvation – living with the unconditional love, eternal peace and absolute joy that Jesus won for us by humbling becoming one of us and that God continues to give us this day through his Holy Spirit.

Reject pride and humbly accept this amazing gift.  Love unconditionally and universally as God loves all of his creation.  See in each and every person one whom Jesus was born for and one whom Jesus died for, as he was born and died for me, as he was born and died for you. 

Only in this humility, can we recognize and realize the exaltation that God desires for every one of us.  Only by resting in him are our deepest needs fulfilled.