October 23, 2011
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 22: 34-40
Gospel Summary
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is frequently involved in confrontational situations.
This reflects the tensions in the church of Antioch between conservative Jewish
Christians and more liberal converts from among the Gentiles. The Pharisees in
this gospel represent in some sense a conservative position that emphasizes
observance of the law. They want to draw Jesus into their own interminable and
sterile disputes about the relative importance of their numerous and detailed
legal minutiae.
Jesus responds by quoting the essence of that great text from Deuteronomy
(Chapter 6: verses 5 and 6) which as been justly called the heart of Israel’s
covenant commitment. In fact, when devout Jews today attach a mezuzah to their
door posts, it contains this very text. And it does indeed sum up the divine
revelation of the Old Testament. Its importance, therefore, can scarcely be
overemphasized.
Life Implications
We all recognize the importance of rules of conduct in our society. The
alternative is chaos and the cruel law of sheer power. Laws are often derived
from the accumulated wisdom of society. We have learned from hard experience
that there can be no real freedom without an order that protects rights and
assigns obligations.
At the same time, there are laws that are based on divine revelation and which
we may very well not be able to discover by our own wits. The law that Jesus
calls the first and greatest of all laws belongs to this category, It has two
parts: love of God and love of neighbor.
Love of God always presupposes a prior experience of God’s goodness, and God
offers most of us abundant evidence of such goodness, usually mediated through
the kindness of others and the beauty of creation. Nonetheless, the awareness of
divine goodness may seem to disappear at times, such as at 9/11 or in the
terrible consequence of Katrina. Love of God then becomes trust, which is
especially pleasing to God, for even among humans it is a rare and precious
gift. The experience of God’s goodness that makes such trust possible causes us
to be intensely aware of the gratuity of divine love. The proper response to
such a discovery is wonder and gratitude.
Love of one’s neighbor is profoundly influenced by one's loving relationship
with God, because such human love, at its best, is also gratuitous. The other
person is not loved simply because he or she is attractive. Rather, this love
comes from the goodness of the one who loves and reaches out instinctively to
anyone who is in need. After all, God did not love the Hebrew slaves in Egypt
because they were beautiful or cultivated but simply because he is good and they
were in desperate need. Such unconditional love, even among humans, creates
freedom, confidence and beauty. A person who is loved in this way acquires an
inner beauty, which manifests itself by a special personal sparkle. Perhaps that
is because, even among humans, such love is really divine.
Father Demetrius Dumm, O.S.B.
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