Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

          It so simple, and yet so hard:  “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind...[and] your neighbor as yourself.”  With these words, Jesus once again silences His foes.  In asking him, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest,” His opponents undoubtedly thought that if they could nail Him down to just one of the Ten Commandments or, better still, one of other six-hundred and thirteen additional commandments in the Mosaic law, then they could accuse Jesus of being neglectful of some other law of equal or greater importance.  It is a bit like when someone tries to pin you down to just one cause.  And so, if you say, “I’m for this,” the critics will say, “Well, what about this?  Don’t you care about this?”—as though you could only care about one thing. 

But Jesus won’t be drawn into this logical fallacy which would suggest that if you are for one thing, you must be against all other things.  Rather, He goes straight to the top of the list.  He gives an answer that no Pharisee or scholar of the law could possibly argue with.  Which is the greatest commandment?  “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  This is the great verse and prayer known as the Shema Yisrael, taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5. “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”  This is the verse that Jews in Jesus’ time (and many Orthodox Jews to this day) would have literally wrapped around their wrists and worn on their foreheads in little boxes called “Tefillin” or phylacteries.  This is the verse that would be put on a tiny scroll and placed in something called a “Mezuzah” that was placed on the doorpost of a Jewish home, so that the inhabitants of that home could touch it and remind themselves of this all-important law every time they entered or left their home.  And so, there is no way that any of Jesus’ adversaries could have argued with this answer.  This was truly the first and greatest commandment in the law.

But Jesus quickly adds to this first and greatest commandment by saying, “The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This too would have been familiar to Jesus’ mostly Jewish audience, as this is drawn from Leviticus 19:18 and is hardly a foreign concept in the Old Testament.  For example, we can hear something of this in the reading from Exodus that was our first reading today: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”  What is this but an exhortation to God’s people to treat others as they would have liked to have been treated when they were in similar circumstances?

What Jesus does so brilliantly here, though, is to bind these two commandments together.  He’s not simply restating these familiar commandments, but in a powerful way showing how they are connected.  To truly love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength means that we will also love everything and everyone that God loves.  Love of neighbor is a natural and logical derivative of love of God. 

We find this already within the Ten Commandments; in their very structure.  If you think of it, the first three commandments—“I, the Lord, am your God…You shall not have other gods besides me”; “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”; and “Remember to keep holy the Lord’s Day”—all have to do with love of God.  Commandments four through ten, from honoring your mother and father down to not coveting your neighbor’s goods, all have to do with love of neighbor; how we treat each other.  But these are not really ten separate commandments.  They are parts of a unified whole; what we call the “Decalogue.”  It is more of a “ten-part law” than ten individual laws.  And so, they are to be taken as a whole.  To violate one or another of these is, in some sense, to violate the whole law.  And to fulfill one or another of these is to honor the whole law. 

The author of the first letter of John puts it even more forcefully: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.  This is the commandment we have from him; whoever loves God must also love his brother.”  And so, these two commandments are not simply a nice “matched set,” but are, in fact, inextricably linked.  Love of God and love of neighbor are intimately bound up with each other.

Of course, it is easy to say this, but hard to actually live it out.  And so, there is a temptation to accept this “double commandment” of Jesus only abstractly—first, to love God only abstractly, as an idea.  But if we only love God in this way, we will soon find that we only pray to God when we need something, that we quickly forget God when everything is going well in our lives, and that we even more quickly blame God when things are not. 

This is, in a sense, the “creed” of what is called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” as defined by the authors of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, written in 2005.  The five main tenants of this “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” are: (1) a god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth; (2) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; (3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.; (4) God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem; (5) Good people go to heaven when they die.  This may look like Christianity, but really it is a clever counterfeit, in part because, again, God is only really loved as an abstraction.  In other words, God is kept at a comfortable distance—close enough to plead with and to blame, but not so close as to really have a claim on our lives.

The other temptation in regard to this double commandment is to love our neighbor, again, only abstractly.  I’m reminded here of the Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz in which the character Linus exclaims, “I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand!”  It’s easy to say that we love people in general, but much harder in reality to love a person, a specific person, “that person” (whoever that is for us), often the person or the people closest to us or whom we encounter on a day to day basis.  And yet, if this commandment to love our neighbor means anything, it means our love must become real, concrete, incarnate.

Again, we can turn to our first reading from Exodus for examples of this.  “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”  We need only think of immigrants in our own country and community and the uncertainty they face as they try to make a better live for themselves and their families, or of the international refugee crisis.  “You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.”  How well do we see to the needs of those who have lost someone or who are in some way abandoned?  “If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall not act like an extortioner toward him.”  We need only think of predatory lending practices or structures within our society or economy that seem to keep the poor in poverty.  It doesn’t take much to find ways in which our love of God and, therefore, our love also of neighbor can become very concrete.

And so, my sisters and brothers, let’s not try to “sift out” these commandments, as though one could really take one without the other.  And let’s not be content to live them only “abstractly” or “in theory,” but find ways (however imperfect) in our daily lives to truly love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.