The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 18, 2011

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      Last Sunday the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with their rather disingenuous question about paying taxes to Caesar; today they’re back at it, putting him to the test with their question about which of the commandments is the greatest. In both cases, Jesus exhibits a cleverness and a cool reserve that leave them speechless.

     This particular passage always reminds me of a little incident I’ve shared with you before and will take the liberty of doing so again! It took place years ago, and I was the one who got put to the test.  I was attending a week-long seminar on Canon Law at the University of San Francisco (you probably don’t need me to tell you what a stimulating week that was!). One afternoon I was walking across the campus and got talking with a young woman who asked me why I was on campus.  When I told her I was attending a workshop on Church Law, I figured the conversation would end there.  But it didn’t – quite.  She wanted to know a little about Church law.  Did the Church have many of them, she asked? I told her that there were quite a few but not nearly as many as there used to be.  A recent revision, I told her, had trimmed the total number by more than 600 – we’d gone from 2400 laws to fewer than 1800.  I guess I said that with a certain ring of satisfaction in my voice.  It sounded like progress to me.  Not to my young friend, however.  She stopped dead in her tracks, looked me in the eye, and asked, "How come Jesus only had two?!"

     Now, I might have been able to give her a fairly cogent answer if I had had the time and she the patience.  But I preferred simply to say "touché!"  To be honest, I was delighted by her question.  It told me that she knew some Scripture and that she understood the bottom line of Jesus' teaching.  Not everyone does. And sometimes the religious "professionals" (people like me and those more highly placed), sometimes the religious professionals can get lost in a forest of laws and regulations.

     The religious professionals of Jesus' day were no exception.  They had a field day with some 613 individual precepts they counted in the Torah, the Law of God.  Rabbis loved to debate the relative importance of each of those 613 precepts, and, as you might expect, there was no agreement among them: there was more than one school of thought. In fact, to know how a particular rabbi ordered and summarized the Law was the key to knowing what school he belonged to.

     In today's Gospel passage from Matthew, when Jesus the Rabbi was approached by some lawyers and asked his opinion on this matter he allied himself with a particular rabbinic school, the one which taught that the entire Law could be summarized by just two great scriptural passages:  one from the Book of Deuteronomy, the other from the Book of Leviticus.  Let me say just a word about each of those.
     The first, from Deuteronomy, contained words that were on the lips of a devout Jew every day and many times a day (a little like the Sign of the Cross, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Hail Mary might be on ours): "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind."  That, Jesus said to the lawyer, was the first commandment.  And then he cited the Book of Leviticus, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  That, he said, was the second commandment, and (and this is very important) it was like the first. Scholars tell us that what was unique about Jesus' answer to the Lawyer was not his citing of the two commandments from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.  Other Rabbis did that.  What was unique was the way Jesus joined -- you might say merged -- those two commandments, putting them on equal footing. Neither of the two could stand alone, he was saying: you really couldn't have the one without the other.  Now that was not only new, it was radical. It was Jesus' way of saying that you don’t love God if you don’t love your neighbor.

     I called this "radical".  It is.  We may be so used to the idea that it seems rather commonplace to us.  But radical it is.  For this reason:  it puts God and human beings together in the same breath, the same sentence.  Jesus is saying that God and human beings made in the image and likeness of God, are so one, so intertwined and interconnected that, even though their difference be greater by far than night is from day, nonetheless they cannot be separated.

     The implications are enormous. Religion is as horizontal as it is vertical. Religion is as much about things that take place outside of church as inside (things like the St. Vincent de Paul Society outreach, or the overnight winter shelter, or the Cathedral Kitchen, or visiting the sick or imprisoned, or teaching English to an immigrant, or catechism to kids, or sponsoring a catechumen, or volunteering in the mental health ministry).  Religion is not one or the other, it’s both. Religion means seeking and finding our identity in the Other -- in God who is the Totally Other, and in our sisters and brothers who are created in God's image and likeness.

     Let me conclude with a little story from the Sufi mystical tradition of the East.  One day a holy monk sat in the marketplace and watched the crippled, the beggars, and the beaten go by.  Seeing them, the holy monk went down into deep prayer and cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"  And out of the long silence God said, "I did do something about them.  I made you!"
 

     Father Michael G. Ryan