Last
Sunday we had the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus with their disingenuous
question about paying taxes to Caesar; today they’re at it again,
testing him with their question about which of the commandments is the
greatest. In both cases, Jesus shows himself to be more than their
match.
You’ll pardon me, I hope, if I tell a story
I’ve shared with you before. It’s a story I like – a true one that took
place years ago when I was attending a week-long seminar on Canon Law at
the University of San Francisco (I’m sure you can imagine 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 there.
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
something about Church law. Did the Church have many laws, 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 said
that with a certain ring of satisfaction in my voice because it sounded
like progress to me. Not to my young friend, however. She 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 "touche!" To be honest, I was delighted by her
question. It told me that she knew some Scripture and that she knew the
heart of Jesus' teaching. Not everyone does. And too often, it’s the
religious "professionals" who can get lost in a forest of rules and
regulations. That’s true now, and it was true in Jesus’ time.
The religious professionals in his time had a
field day with some 613 individual precepts that made up the Torah, the
Law of God. Rabbis loved to debate the relative importance of each
precept, and there was more than one school of thought. In fact, to know
how a particular rabbi prioritized the laws was to know what school he
belonged to.
In today's passage from Matthew’s gospel, when
Jesus the Rabbi was asked by some Pharisees which commandment of the Law
was the greatest, he allied himself with a particular school that taught
that the whole Law could be summarized by just two scriptural passages:
one from the Book of Deuteronomy, the other from the Book of Leviticus.
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 told 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) – he told
him that 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, giving them equal footing. Neither could stand alone, he
said: you really couldn't have the one without the other. And that
was not only new, it was radical. Jesus was saying if you don’t love
your neighbor, you don’t love God.
I said this was "radical". It is. We may have
heard it so often that it seems rather commonplace. 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 God’s image and likeness, are so one, so intertwined and
interconnected that, even though their difference be greater than night
from day, in no sense can they be separated.
The implications are enormous. Religion is not
only vertical, it is horizontal. Religion is about Mass and the
sacraments, for sure, but it is just as much about the way we treat each
other. It’s about acceptance, patience, tolerance, forgiveness; it’s
about reaching out to the homeless and the hurting, the helpless, and
the hopeless. It’s about putting ourselves and our resources on the line
for others. It’s even about how we vote. Religion is loving God and
neighbor, it’s about 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. 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
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