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+ WHICH COMMANDMENT IN THE LAW IS THE GREATEST? — 30th
Sunday in Ordinary Time
It is striking that, in his response to this question of the Pharisee, Jesus
quotes from the great Shema, the prayer that every faithful Jew recited twice a
day. To love the Lord our God, with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds
far exceeds any human capacity of our own. It is the work of God in us and only
by constant prayer may we come to express such love. But isn’t this the very
thing we most easily forget and need to remind ourselves again and again. To
live as children of God, whether as monks in a monastery, Christians in the
world, we are continually dependent on the grace of God, on the love that God
pours out within and upon us through the Holy Spirit.
Recently I heard quoted that one of our monks, a highly respected senior (and I
won’t mention a name), is to have said that before the end of his life, he hoped
to have done one act of pure love. I suspect that he has done many for such love
is not his own doing but the work of God within and through him. To love God
with the totality of our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves is a divine
initiative in the silent, hidden moments of our lives. To claim it as our own
would be to lose it. Might it be that only in prayer do we come to know the
depth of our need and the gift of loving with the whole of our lives.
Volumes have been written on today’s gospel, the relation of the two great
commandments. The love of our neighbor is inseparable from our love of God,
giving our love of God both a focus and practical expression. St John highlights
this relationship when he tells us that unless we love our brother or sister
whom we see, we cannot say we love God whom we do not see. The two commandments
are closely bound up but are not to be confused or dissolved one into the other.
It has been pointed out (Walter Brueggemann) that "often atheists or humanists
keep the second commandment in a way that far exceeds what most Christians or
Jews do. ...There is a dimension of loving God that goes beyond or is different
from loving one’s neighbor... God remains the ultimate point of reference for
human life."1
It is only in and from God that we can hope to fulfill all that is being asked
of us.
What is more, Jesus is reminding the Pharisees and his followers that what is
owed to God and neighbor, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, is more
than a carrying out of a mere precept or legal formula but a whole way of life,
a total gift of self. It is so easy to speak of love and yet it seems so out of
reach, so far beyond our merely human resources. What love asks of us is without
limit or restriction. As St Paul so beautifully tells us: "It bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.."
Therefore love brings us right up against our vast poverty and incompleteness.
Any real Jew, any disciple of Christ or fully human being, lives in complete
dependence on the gift of God’s own goodness and love.
Anyone who lives in the awareness of such dependence, cannot ignore the alien,
the widow or orphan for he or she sees immediately his or her own flesh, their
own selves. The cry of the poor, the cry that God will surely hear is the one
that rises up from deep down in our own hearts. The great pretension of
possessions is the way it blinds us to the prayer rising up out of our very
depths. Of course the Christian cannot demand interest from a poor neighbor who
cannot pay, and I’m reminded here of the whole mortgage crisis going on in this
country, for the simple reason that our neighbors poverty is our own. Nor can we
withhold our neighbor’s cloak as the night draws on by reason of the warmth so
gratuitously bestowed upon us by our loving God.
A simple story I recently read may say all this better than my own attempts
above. It is about "a tramp who came begging at a good woman’s door. She went to
get something to give him and found that she had no change in the house. She
went to him and said, ‘I have no small change but I need a loaf of bread. Here
is a twenty dollar bill. Go and buy the loaf and bring me back the change and I
will give you something.’ The man executed the commission and returned and she
gave him some of the change. He took it with tears in his eyes. ‘It’s not the
money,’ he said, ‘it’s the way you trusted me. No one ever trusted me like that
before, and I can’t thank you enough."
God, in Christ, has entrusted us with the Eucharist, a gift beyond all we could
ever want or imagine. May we have an abiding sense of the love and trust God has
put in us, sharing the incredible gift that Jesus is, with all with whom we live
and all who may be a neighbor to us.
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1 W.
Brueggemann, C. Cousar, B. Gaventa, J. Newsome, Texts for Preaching, A
Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV-Year A, Westminster R. Knox Press, 1995,
p. 542.
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