Jesus teaches us that through faith and obedience to God’s will, we all have the opportunity to become members of his family. Every disciple of Jesus is his brother, sister, mother and a member of his family. He came to save all who are ready to do the will of God. His mother and our mother Mary is a great model of this for all of us.
In the First Reading (Gen 3:9-15) we are reminded of how sin entered the world by the disobedience of our first parents to the law of God. By eating from the tree, Adam and Eve wanted to be their own moral standard and chose to replace God’s moral order with their own. In the Second Reading, St Paul reminds the brethren in Corinth of the centrality of faith in the resurrection. In the Gospel Jesus teaches that his true family includes those who do God’s will.
The sin of our first parents is presented as the refusal and failure to obey the will of God. The fall of humanity, as described in the first reading, had profound spiritual and moral consequences. As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 418).
If we just looked at every human person as a child of God and sought to do the will of God, life on earth would be different. We would respect human life. We would not be experiencing the senseless wars around us. Our politics and economy would be at the service of enhancing the life and dignity of the human person.
Adam’s disobedience to God allowed sin to enter the world. In the same way, the obedience of Jesus, the new Adam, to God, his loving Father, allowed salvation to enter the world. Through obedience to God, Jesus established a new family of God, a family where we are privileged to belong. Today, we are reminded that God loves the human race and walks with us on our journey of life. He gave the human race Jesus, our Lord and Redeemer who by word and deed announced to the world that God is our Father who cares for all His sons and daughters. God wants to gather all men and women into one.
The will of God is our salvation. Our Father “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3-4). His will is that we love Him and love one another. The commandment of love summarizes all other commandments and expresses his entire will. The will of the Father has been perfectly fulfilled once and for all in Jesus Christ who could say: “I always do what is pleasing to him” (Jn 8:29). Jesus reminds us that we can only have access to the kingdom of heaven not by words alone but by doing “the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 7:21).
Seeking and doing the will of God is an affirmation of the centrality for God in our lives. “Were God to lose his centrality man would lose his rightful place, he would no longer fit into creation, into relations with others” (Pope Benedict XVI). Outside God we are doomed. Without seeking to do and doing the will of God we lose our dignity, identity and direction.
Let us take this opportunity to ask ourselves a few pertinent questions regarding our relationship with God and with one another. In my community, do I feel like a member of the family of Jesus? Do I see others and treat them with the dignity of the children of God? In my choices, do I seek the will of God?
Jesus calls us his family members, ‘brothers, sisters and mother’. Let us ask for the grace to do His will. We have a responsibility in our communities to contribute to the building of this family, in which we are all brothers and children of a single Father. We have to work hard in fighting temptations that seek to separate us from God and from our brothers, and create divisions and disputes among us. As we pray the Lord’s Prayer today, let us renew our commitment to discern and with the help of the Holy Spirit seek to do the will of God always.