Ordinary 31-B-November, 5, 2006
Mark 12: 28-34
Fr. Carl McCarthy
 

About 10 years ago, a reporter from the USA Today newspaper was in Somalia covering a terrible famine. One day he witnessed an outstanding event.

A photographer, traveling with the reporter, gave a young boy a grapefruit. The photographer had the grapefruit because, in the strange world where a journalist covers a famine, the hotel where he was staying had plenty of food supplies. Upon leaving the hotel, he traveled in a van, where he encountered the victims of famine he had been assigned to cover.

So this photographer snuck a grapefruit out of the hotel and gave it to the starving boy. The boy seemed so weak, the reporter wrote, that he hardly seemed strong enough to hold the grapefruit. The photographer cut the grapefruit in half and handed one of the halves to the boy.  He took it, looked at the reporter and the photographer as if to say, thanks, and then began his walk back to the village. The reporter followed at a distance.

When the boy entered the village, the boy came to a younger boy lying on the ground.  They learned later that this was his brother. The boy knelt beside his brother, cut off a piece of the grapefruit and chewed it. Then he opened the younger brother’s mouth, took some of the grapefruit from his mouth, put it into his brother’s mouth, and worked his brother’s jaws up and down.

The reporter learned that the older brother had been doing this for the younger brother for a couple of weeks.  A few days later the reporter and photographer returned to the village to learn that the older brother had died of malnutrition, and the younger brother was still alive.

What is unbelievable about this story is how it disrupts human nature.  The older brother is starving, his own life in jeopardy; he was too weak to carry an ordinary grapefruit, and yet, he sacrificed his own needs. The older brother revealed something in the relationship with his brother, something that God dramatically reveals in God’s relationship with us.

I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said to the scribe, “you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul and with all of your mind; that is greatest commandment. The second is like it; you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

To love another is really very simple - to love is to act. That’s what love means, action. We can’t only tell someone that we love them, but we must show them that we love them, and sometimes that means that we have to make sacrifices. We can so easily complicate love with money, power, feelings and words. We spend a lot of time and money on trying to figure out how to love or where we went wrong with love. Think of the time that we spend reading self-help books, or talking to a therapist, or buying a gift to win love back, or making ourselves look good, so that others will love us. Now, certainly, there are times when we may need to do these things -- to learn more about how to love, to talk about love or even to buy a gift for someone we love.

What if, though, we let go of all the niceties and simply acted in love?  And, even more to the point, what if we sacrificed a little of ourselves, so that another could see our love?