Matthew 22:34-40
We are all familiar with this short
gospel; some of us could probably recite it by heart. But it's
interesting to see how Mark, Luke and Matthew deal with this same
saying of Jesus. For Mark, Jesus has just given an answer that
everyone approves of, and in that context a teacher of the law asks
Jesus which is the most important commandment – a straightforward
question. In Luke, a man asks Jesus what must he do to be saved, and
Jesus asks him how he reads the law, and he answers with these words,
which introduce the parable of the Good Samaritan. In Matthew's
account, which we've just heard, it says, “a scholar of the law
tested him”. Last Sunday, of course, Jesus' opponents came to him
with a coin showing the head of Caesar and asked about the census tax
– and it says they did this to test him. Same word. So the
testing of Jesus continues.
The scholar of the law undoubtedly had
in mind the 613 laws that were supposed to have been handed down by
Moses. There were two ways to answer his question. One was to say
they are all equally important, because that was the official
position of the Pharisees, who strove to keep all these commandments.
On the other hand, there were several other schools of thought which
argued that some laws were more important than others. If you lived
in Rome, for example, you couldn't keep any of the laws having to do
with sacrifice and temple worship, because you couldn't get to the
temple, and the leaders of those congregations believed some laws
were more important than others. And the Sadduccees and Essenes and
Zealots and other parties all emphasized different laws. Jesus could
not give any answer without offending someone.
But again, he calls their attention to
the prayer that every good Jew recited every day, “Hear O Israel,
the Lord our God is One. You shall love the Lord your God with your
whole heart, mind and strength”. That wasn't even counted among
the 630 laws; it was sort of self-evident. Had Jesus stopped there,
I suspect his listeners would have concluded that he had won the
argument. But he went on to say, “the second is like it”. In
other words, this next commandment, which actually was one of the 630
and came from the book of Leviticus, was being elevated by Jesus to
the rank of number 2 instead of being there along with not boiling a
kid in it's mother's milk and leaving some grain on the stalks so
that poor people could come through and harvest a little for
themselves. And the third thing is that Jesus doesn't just stop at
loving your neighbor, he adds, as yourself, which wasn't in the
Leviticus commandment.
So Jesus is actually giving a new
teaching, and he goes on to identify these two commandments as the
bedrock of everything that had ever been said by Moses, by the
prophets, by all the teachers of Israel.
Perhaps we should ask what does it
mean to love ourselves, or love our neighbor? We aren't talking
about feelings of course. To Jesus, love consists of desiring that
the object of your love reach his or her potential and being willing
to do something about it. A starving person can't achieve his
potential without at least being fed. To love your neighbor might
mean to feed him. And I can't reach my potential if I am captive to
any number of slaveries – like addiction, like detrimental habits
like wasting time, procrastination, gossip, painful sarcasm, making
excuses for myself. To love myself means that I recognize where I am
not meeting the mark and do something about it. That is usually
hard, because it involves change, and we have spent our lives telling
ourselves why we can't change.
But loving God is another story. We
can't desire that God reach his potential; he's there. No room for
improvement. Communicating with God through prayer and keeping his
commandments is certainly part of loving God, although one could
argue that it's in our best interest to do these things and whether
praying and keeping God's commandments springs from love or fear
doesn't matter, so long as we do these things. But I think loving
God means first of all, appreciating His creation as a reflection of
Him, and part of his creation is of course, you and I. Second, it
means taking seriously the Lord's prayer, in which we say, “Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. In
heaven there is no poverty, no estrangement, no prejudice, no war and
in fact no sickness or death. When we are striving to align our
world with heaven, we are loving God by bringing the world closer to
its ultimate goal. Third, loving God means making a priority of the
work we were given at baptism, to become more and more His son or
daughter, to become more and more like Christ, like Mary, like the
great saints – you pick one and model your life after that person,
because the Church has held that person up as a model for you,
someone who lived a life in imitation of Christ.
Loving God, as I think you can see,
fits the definition of love – we can't hope that God will achieve
his potential, but we can hope that his creation does, and then we do
something about it consciously and making our effort a priority.
So Jesus' commandment is in a way,
really just one commandment. You can't love God without loving your
neighbor and loving yourself.
