God tells us in our first reading that we are to treat people with the love they deserve. The focus here is on immigrants, widows, orphans, and the poor. This is almost a trap for our minds to automatically think that this is all about what they need, because these brothers and sisters of ours are identified by what they lack: a country of their own, a family, money. But this is far from the point of God’s message.
Christ gets right to the point in our Gospel passage, bringing forth what we should glean from all of God’s commandments:
You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.
We see here exactly what God is saying in the first reading when He tells us:
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.
God is reminding us that these unfortunate among us are our brothers and sisters precisely because they are God’s beloved children, just as we are. There is no reason we should think of anyone as anything else, because to see them as fellow children of God is always the primary way we should identify everyone. Let us not fall into a trap by seeing our brothers and sisters through the lens of their circumstances. Let us always see the person, that child of God, and only after that see the circumstances of their life.
St. Anthony Catholic Church 