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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time A
October 23, 2011

Reading I: Exodus 22:20-26
Responsorial Psalm: 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
Reading II: 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10
Gospel: Matthew 22:34-40


"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 neighbour as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."


Over the past week or so in this place we have shared our thoughts on the basic question:

What's it all about?


See: "What is the ultimate purpose in being a Christian/being a Catholic?" LINK


While I did not have time to take part then, this gospel passage deals with the same question. In short, when Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment (probably a common topic amongst those scholars who loved to debate the scriptures), his reply was not to indicate one of the 10 commandments, like “Do not have false gods before me”; or “Keep holy the sabbath day”. Instead his answer explains what is the ultimate purpose of the law and the prophets, of the whole complex of religion, Judaism, Christianity, and all the other attempts to confront the ultimate challenges of existence.


It is to love God,

and the second commandment is like the first, to love your neighbour.

But one will object that we need to know the truth before we can be motivated to love.

Another will say that love is relationship and we cannot love someone we do not see, whose very existence is a matter of belief, rather than of known fact.

To believe is always a free and deliberate choice to take a leap of faith, stepping out beyond the relative certainty of evidence to accept what someone tells us about a revelation or an enlightenment. The only confirmation we can have is within our own experience when we find that what is revealed is life-giving,  or we find some satisfaction in that it seems to explain some things - at least for me. There are others who consider such a "leap of faith" to be an irresponsible abandonment of rationality.

As happens with the parables, I find here too that if I stay with these verses long enough, eventually they make sense. But it is necessary to go back and forth through them, to turn them over to look at the underside, to pull them apart to see how each bit works on its own, and so on. There is not much help to be found in the commentators, although this one gets to the point eventually:

John Kavanaugh, S. J. of Saint Louis University

http://liturgy.slu.edu/30OrdA102311/theword_embodied.html

Clearly the very word “to love” is a problem. The heart of the matter, I think, is that, while we might think of love as an emotion, it basically consists of a preference, a choice to put someone FIRST, before others. This becomes a habit in the mind as love develops, to think of that one first in every situation.


Secondly, we need to distinguish real love - 'love' as in a life-choice, from those other 'loves' in which we have a superficial liking for someone or something – “I love Crowded House”; “I love coffee”. Love that is truly worthy of the name refers to a very deep commitment of me to you. The text Jesus quotes says: “with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength”. That's just a description of real love as compared to the many secondary preferences we make.

Thirdly, it occurs to me that the “truth” our mind so hungers for is not a treasure we can possess, or a light that will show how everything works, or a sign pointing out the ethical path through life's tangled situations. The truth that is embodied in our loving is something WE DO. The height of the christian's life is doing the truth in love.

In loving, we have to be true, to be genuine, as any two young people who are experiencing their first love will tell you. Sorting out the relationship that is true from the attachment that is basically selfish or convenient or just emotional or even just sexual, is what 'going together' is all about. Separating true love from falsehoods.


The truth we seek is the truth we have to be.

We are not hungry to know answers.

We are desperate to be true,

authentic, genuine, honest, transparent, total, through and through.

If there is a problem in loving God

it does not lie in that mysterious doubt about whether god really exists or not;

it is found in our reluctance to go the whole way in living in truth, or in truly living.


It really doesn't matter in the last analysis, whether our 'god' is JHWH, or Jesus, or Allah, or the One from whom Enlightenment comes, or the Great Unknown, or simply "an honest stance of respect for the integrity of the human mind which refuses to take myth for reality". What does matter is that we are genuine. What matters is that I be true. What matters is that I love, giving myself to the ones I love totally, without deception, without trading, without calculating profit margins, without holding back.

Be that as it might, the next question is: How do we love someone we cannot see, with whom therefore we cannot experience an interpersonal relationship? Surely this is a case in which there is room for self deception. Young people willingly try to love God, because they like loving people, grandpa, and uncle Bill, and cousins whom they hardly know. When they are told that they should love God, they will generate feelings towards “God” and convince themselves that this is loving the God they cannot see. When at times those feelings seem to have a life of their own and the young person is “filled with love”, he or she might well be convinced that this is God responding with his love.

At a mature age such a religious person will need to test these ideas about their love of God with the aid of a competent director, guide or guru. In the absence of an adequate tradition of spiritual direction, as a blanket solution to the problem of self-deception (a syndrome sometimes called “being in love with love”) where this experience may be confused with a true relationship with God, the Roman Catholic Church has tended generally to caste doubt on any expressions of intense spiritual or mystical experience. And so we reach something of an impasse. Is it really possible to love the god you cannot see?


Jesus tells us that the way out of this impasse lies in the second commandment: to love the neighbour, the neighbour whom you can see, the neighbour who shares your life, who lives next door, who sits beside you on the train, who works at the next bench, who is your mate or your rival or your boss. The same rules of love apply: it is a matter of prioritising, of putting this other one first; of being deeply committed to their welfare, and of being genuine in our relationship with them.

So important is this commandment that one can reverse the order of the two: First, love your neighbours, care for them, make their welfare your top priority, and in a crisis give yourself, sacrifice yourself for them. Then you will find that the matter of loving God is already taken care of, and there will be no doubt about it.

Then you can lift up your heart, and offer yourself to the Lord of Creation just as you are, in joy and peace. The key to this whole issue is the fact that it is not about God, but about us. It is not that God needs us to love him/her, but that we, to be complete, need to hold in first place that centre of being that we call 'God'. It is not that God needs us to take care of our neighbour: it is we who need respect, and protection when we're are in a tight spot, and we need to do for others  as we would like them to do for us.


"Love your neighbour as yourself". As you love your own self. Amazing. For too long has the message been to hate yourself: something which Jesus seems to have said in a different context. Here he makes self love the standard, the measure of love for the neighbour. Life goes so much better when we love our own selves. It flourishes, like the lovely rose outside my window that shares is colour and its fragrance all around. It reminds me of an old axiom of the scholastics of the middle ages: Bonum est diffusivum sui. The Good tends to spread itself around. Enough of the guilt and miserable disdain of self. Let's be like the Father who makes his sun shine on all our neighbours.


At each stage of life we progress to a new understanding of what it is to love:

in childhood when emotions are supplying the power to live and grow – when we can be truly pious in our love for God whom we perceive as really loving us;

in adolescence when we grow passionate and strong and anxious to test our love;

in young adulthood when love is challenged to be true and genuine and a total and mutual commitment;

in parenthood when demands without end are met with warmth and patience;

in the maturity of middle age when we shift up a gear and see the possibility of putting the loved-one first in a whole new light;

in older age when we have grown beyond all commandments and come to realise that indeed to love the Lord and the neighbour contains the whole meaning of the law and the prophets, contains all the instructions, the teachings, the dogmas, the rewards and punishments of life. These were all taking us along to the point where love is all there is, and it is total and completely voluntary. Where at last perfect love casts out fear, and we enjoy the peace of God in Christ, forever doing the truth in love.