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January 25, 2024Theme of the 2024 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity :
“You shall love the Lord your God ... and your neighbour as yourself” (Luke 10:27).
The Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches prepared a text to help us on the way of unity :
The centrality of love in Christian life
Love is the ‘DNA’ of Christian faith. God is Love and “the love of Christ has gathered us into one”. We find our common identity in the experience of God’s love (cf. Jn 3:16) and reveal that identity to the world by how we love one another (Jn 13:35). In the passage selected for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2024 (Lk 10:25-37), Jesus reaffirmed the traditional Jewish teaching from Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”; and Leviticus 19:18b, “you shall love your neighbour as yourself”.The lawyer in the gospel passage immediately asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbour?” Jesus responds to the question with a parable illustrating love extending far beyond the limits expected by the lawyer.
Many early Christian writers such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom and Augustine saw the trajectory of God’s plan for the salvation of the world in this parable. They saw the man coming down from Jerusalem as an image of Adam – ie all humanity – coming down from paradise to this world, with all its dangers and brokenness, and the robbers as an image of the hostile earthly powers that assail us. They saw Christ himself as the one who, moved by compassion, came to the aid of the half-dead man, treated his wounds and brought him to the safety of an inn, which they saw as an image of the Church. The Samaritan’s promise to return was seen as foreshadowing the Lord’s promise to come again.
Christians are called to act like Christ in loving like the Good Samaritan, showing mercy and compassion to those in need, regardless of their religious, ethnic or social identity. It is by learning to love one another regardless of our differences that Christians can become neighbours like the Samaritan in the Gospel.
The Way of Ecumenism Jesus prayed that his followers would all be one (cf. Jn 17:21), and so Christians cannot lose hope or stop praying and working for unity. They are united by their love of God in Christ and by the experience of knowing God’s love for them. They recognise this faith experience in one another when they pray, worship and serve God together. During the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we ask the Lord to come to our assistance, to tend our wounds and so enable us to walk the way of ecumenism with confidence and hope.
See the pictures of the meeting
