Jesus Changes Everything. Muestra

Because Jesus Changes Everything - Everywhere we show up with the love of Jesus

If you’ve ever had a garden you’ve taken care of, or in my case, failed to take care of, you’ll know that there’s a big difference between a well-kept garden and one that’s been ignored. The one that’s poorly taken care of is full of weeds that choke out the growth of what was planted. When you love a garden, or at least the fruit it produces, enough to really take good care of it, it means pulling up the weeds sometimes. In order to get rid of weeds properly, you don’t just cut them so short you can barely see them, you pull them up by the roots because if you don’t they’ll just re-grow.

Cain was angry and jealous of the favor God showed to his younger brother and that anger and jealousy led him to commit murder. John, in the reading today, recognizes that Cain’s fundamental failure was a failure to love. All sin is, at its root, the failure to love. That’s why Jesus, when questioned about what the greatest commandment is, says:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” - Mt 22:37-40

All of God’s laws are rooted in the love of God and neighbor. As Christians, we are called to love like Jesus, and part of loving is rooting out sin from our lives. Jesus, like John in the reading today, goes so far as to compare anger and hatred toward a brother to murder (Mt 5:21-26). This comparison might seem a bit extreme, it does to me, but Jesus, and the apostle John after him, recognize that these are sins from the same stalk. I don’t think most of us have murdered anyone, but we all know what it’s like to be jealous or angry unjustly. We all have weeds in our lives and instead of simply keeping them in check so that they don’t bring us to the point of murder, we need to pull them up by the roots. Take a moment to consider the weeds in your life; how can removing even the small weeds be an expression of love? - Wes Viau

How does the hard work of "pulling weeds" in our own lives help us in the way that we show up with Christ? How does this passage inform the way that we can practice being "present" with those we encounter this week?