30th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Fr. Ben Riley
Let’s recall where we are in the church year, because the liturgical year which ends on first Sunday of Advent, is almost over. During this season of Ordinary Time, we’ve been working through the Gospel of Matthew, and have now finally arrived at the week of our Lord’s passion. We are now in Jerusalem listening to Jesus teach and debate right before he goes to his death. Last week, we read about how the Pharisees and Herodians questioned Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar. Now, one of the best scholars among the Pharisees tests him again with a question about the law.
Jesus is asked which commandment in the law is the greatest? And He replies that the greatest commandment is love of God, followed closely by love of neighbor. It’s a common misconception that by summarizing the law with the two commands of love Jesus was somehow making the law less challenging or less demanding. That is certainly not case. To perfectly live out love for God and love for neighbor is all consuming, and very challenging. It is also a common misconception that the Pharisees had high moral standards, and Jesus was criticizing them for their high standards, and was instead dumming things down to a generic “be nice to everyone”.
If you go back and read the law of Moses, you will notice that the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and Essenes did not have a very high moral standard. They had a high ritual standard but frequently submitted to very low moral demands. Jesus is primarily criticizing them for hypocrisy in holding to high ritual standards but neglecting matters of morality, and using a strange legal reasoning to create loopholes in the moral law that allowed them to neglect love of neighbor.
By emphasizing that the whole law can be summed up in the two commandments of love, Jesus does not make it easier to fulfill the law. He makes it more challenging, because there are no loopholes in love! We don’t have the same “get out of jail free card” that the Pharisees did, by using out of context sections of the Torah to explain why love of neighbor isn’t that important.
Of course, in order for Jesus’ command of love to be followed, love has to be properly understood. Many reduce love to an emotion or confuse love with niceness. There is an emotional component of love, of course, and love can express itself as being nice. But love has to follow truth, and it is not ultimately loving to tell people falsehoods or encourage them along a false path that will not lead them to true happiness, a relationship with God. The difficulty arises, as we all know, when we love someone who is engaging in self-destructive behavior, but they don’t realize it. And when, motivated by love, we point it out to them, they perceive us not as loving, but as hostile, or narrow- minded, or traditional , or intolerant, or some other category. This is why understanding what is meant by “love of God” is so important, because it can get easily misconstrued.
Let’s discuss what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. The heart can be understood as the seat of our emotions, so loving God with the heart means cultivating our affection and emotional attachment to him. The soul can be understood as our spiritual nature, so loving God with our whole soul is seeking spiritual union of him. And loving God with the mind is an intellectual endeavor; seeking to know God, to understand the truth about him, his nature, and his creation.
We can see a rough analogy to the classic three stages of the spiritual life. The purgative way, involves learning to love God with the heart versus disordered passions and desires. The illuminative way involves loving God with the mind, as our minds are enlightened with the knowledge of God. And the unitive way involves spiritual union; loving God with the soul.
Love must be understood as an act of the will based on truth, and this is where our culture commonly misunderstands. Love that is only oriented around an idea, or an emotion, is pretty useless. Love must, in its essence, be a call to action.
What action is that? Well, in this Gospel Jesus said to love God, and to love our neighbor. But in the Gospel of John he gives us a new commandment that goes even further than the Torah. Jesus says, to love one another, just as I have loved you. The greatest act of love is to lay down your life for a friend, just as Christ laid down his life for us. Love, true love, is always sacrificial.
May God bless you.