Matthew 22:34-40
Today’s gospel recounts a very familiar incident that appears in three of the four gospels. Matthew interprets the question as a trap; Mark has a scribe compliment Jesus, who in turn tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God. In Luke, the questioner, in order to justify himself, asks, “who is my neighbor?” and Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. The three gospel writers tell the same story but put different twists on it.
In Jesus’ time and in our own, a Jewish man or woman familiar with the Torah might have answered the question the same as Jesus -- the two statements are right there in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Jesus in Matthew says that on these commandments rests the whole law and prophets.
They seem simple enough but with a little thought they describe three different kinds of love -- love of God, love of neighbor, love of self.
Do you love God with your whole heart, mind and strength? I don’t. If I’m honest with myself there are a lot of things I love and would hate to lose. The point is that many of the greatest saints, from Ignatius of Antioch who was a disciple of the Apostle John, down to Blessed Fulton Sheen, came to the end of their lives desiring one thing -- to "possess" Jesus. The words were different but they always circled back to meaning that the saint wanted to become one with JEsus -- and that, according to Saint Theresa of Avilla, means becoming detached from all our other loves. If you are a Buddhist your goal is to stop wanting things because all wanting leads to pain. If you are a Christian, your goal is to stop wanting things so that you will desire only that union with the Lord, because as Saint Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O Lord.”
That’s the symbolism behind holy communion -- Jesus becomes our food and drink, our source of life itself. It is our pledge to continue to ;pursue that union with God. For us Catholics, that means we look to our Church to find out how to live; we participate in the sacramental life, we listen when our Church speaks -- because we believe that the Holy Spirit is with the church. If we pick and choose what teachings we will follow and which ones we won’t, then our love of God who speaks to us through the church, is certainly not where it should be. Love of God is a goal and most of us are far from that goal.
Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. But do we love ourselves? You and I can probably think of many people who don’t really love themselves. The simplest way to love yourself is to take care of your health, physical, mental and spiritual. If you are like me, you fail in this. All of us could do better; you know it and I know it. And some of us go so far as to hate ourselves --gambling, alcoholism, drug addiction, sure. But there are some of us addicted to work, to sports, to watching television. Some of us pray every day to ask Saint Joseph to help us not waste our time. So as we turn to our neighbor we need to be sure that we love ourselves; then what we want for our neighbor we already have for ourselves.
Loving our neighbor is different from loving God. God doesn’t need anything of mine; God, being complete and perfect and perfectly happy, cannot be changed by me. God lives outside of time, occupies all of space, yet is completely present in an atom; God is three persons yet one. The theologian Frederick Buckner said that God is so unimaginable that nothing can describe him, so that if you say God exists, you could just as well say God does not exist. Before you write to the bishop and tell him I’m an atheist, I’m really not.
My point is that loving God can only be complete when I totally turn my life over to him, letting go of all my other loves.
Loving our neighbor is different. Jesus used the story of the good Samaritan to illustrate what loving our neighbor means. It doesn't mean giving money to charity -- that’s good of course, the priest and the levite in the story probably gave ten percent of their income to the temple which served as a sort of welfare institution then. Jesus himself encouraged generosity to widows and orphans and demonstrated his own reaching out to lepers and blind and deaf people. But I think the good Samaritan story tells us that our neighbor is someone we meet who needs something we can give. I wander around the nursing home a lot. I get to meet a lot of elderly people with varying degrees of incapacity. There are some who are obviously takers; they complain about the food,the care, the fact that their kids don’t visit and so on. There are others who ask how I am and thank me for coming and sometimes tell me that I’m doing a good job or words to that effect. Like everyone, being affirmed in what I am doing is a very uplifting experience. I remember a cartoon in which someone was given a genuine complement. In the last panel the person was thinking , “I could snack on a complement all day long.” Loving our neighbor means that we train ourselves to uplift those we meet. If it requires bathing his wounds with our oil and wine and transporting him to the inn, we do that. IF it requires a word of affirmation ,we do that too. If it requires that we point out that something the person is doing is going to cause him pain, we do that, even if it’s very difficult. Loving our neighbor is a state of mind that requires practice and repetition to get right.
Loving God, loving our neighbor. Simple, but a lifetime to do well.
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