All the laws and the prophets depend upon in these two that we call the great commandments of Jesus. We teach them to our children as if children could grasp them… but it plants the seed, the seed deep in our psyche, of a possibility of what comes to seem impossible in life.. Because to love God with any part of our being first requires that we believe in him. It is only faith that allows us to be open to his revelation and his desire for a close up and personal relationship. The groups of the Sadduccees and Pharisees portrayed in Matthew’s final week of Jesus life in Jerusalem, we are still in that confrontational Tuesday leading to that fateful Friday, clearly did not believe in him, and therefore couldn’t “love’ him, let alone with their whole hearts, their whole souls, their whole minds. Minds, the latter category, is added in the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew Shema prayer, the one worn on the forehead and arm of orthodox Jews, mind being a particularly Greek concept that replaces one’s whole being in Hebrew. The point is clear, believing and loving with one’s whole person is our salvation, first loving God, then loving our neighbor as ourselves, not more, not less, but as oneself. And it is really it is impossible to love God without loving our neighbor, and our fellow human being created in his image, and to love our neighbor is impossible without first loving God. This is what it means to be a saint, sanctified and made holy by and for the Lord, a desire to love and serve both God and our neighbor.
On October 1st the Church holds up the Virgen and Doctor of the Church, the little Flower, Saint Therese of Liseux, France, who lived just a little over 100 years ago and passed from this world at the tender age of 24 years. She is the most modern Doctor of the Church. We have a bronze statue of her in the Cathedral of our Lady of Guadalupe in Dodge City, a beautiful image of her in her Carmelite habit sitting casting rose petals in a cloud around her. She referred to herself as the “little flower of Jesus in the garden of God”. Novices of her convent reported that Therese said: “After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses” with roses being the symbols of the graces and blessings, one might say a shower of love. Her diary, the story of a soul, certainly showered the church with a rich description of the love of God and the love of neighbor.
So what does this have to do with law? Of course, jesus and his contemporaries are arguing about the so-called Jewish Law of Moses that is in the first 5 books of scripture. Some very orthodox Jewish sects have retained that those first five books is all that exists of the revealed word of God. So the question, which are the most important, is trying to hone in on the word of God to its heart, so to speak, but really for the questioners, trying to get Jesus to blaspheme the law. Matthew of all the Gospel writers is fixed on the fulfillment of the Old Testament, particularly the Law of Moses in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew has a mountain of direct references to the Old Testament marking how Jesus is prefigured in Moses and the law he was given upon the mountain.
Any student of the Law of Moses is, I think first shocked at the amount of the Law that deals with worship, right worship of God. The liturgical rules are explicit. The rituals are exacting. The purity laws are demanding. Scattered throughout the first five books of the bible, though, are the moral rules that we tend to identify with the 10 words or 10 commandments on Mount Sinai, but like the passage today from Exodus, adjacent to the explicit 10 commandments extracted from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5, the care of aliens, widows and orphans as the most vulnerable of human beings is markedly the most persistent throughout, especially the prophets. What we would call the social or moral laws or mandates of God are really intertwined inextricably with the laws of right worship. This is somewhat shocking to us who have grown up in a Christian context where as Peter Kreeft remarks has become a divorced reality, that worship of God has nothing to do with social morality and vice versa. Peter Kreeft puts it this way. “We tend to make one of two opposite mistakes; to confuse social justice with the whole of the Gospel and forget all the other things, especially the supernatural things, or to dismiss worship as an external and accidental and non-essential.”
The response of Jesus to the scholar of the law, someone we expect would have been well versed in the 1st century interpretation of the Law of Moses would have been shocked by Jesus equating the words that come from respectfully, Deuteronomy19, the so-called Shema prayer that all Jews would know by heart in Hebrew and Leviticus chapter 5, this idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, a kind of passing passage in the mixt of the temple worship. Remember that the Hebrew Scriptures were not divided into chapters and verses in Jesus’ day, but flowed in one scroll. Unrolling the scroll therefore is much more than just a physical activity, but symbolizing pouring through the whole of scripture as we unfold the lectionary throughout the year. But in the simple phrase, “the second is like it”…Jesus ties together these two thoughts, the worship, that is the love of God, and the service that is the love of one another as one loves oneself.
We should be aware of our tendency to divorce these two human activities, loving God and loving neighbor, worshiping God and working for social justice. The care of the alien is a constant challenge to our human fallen nature, especially when that fallen human nature is not tempered by the knowledge and love of God. In some ways we have become better with the cultural social safety net for widows and orphans, but our treatment of aliens, those who come from a different cultural remains a constant place of conversion for believers. Pope Francis’ calls the faithful to listen to one another. This is really the only way to break down the barriers that is part of an “us and them” attitude. It is shocking that Jesus doesn’t just ask us, but commands us to love our enemies. This is purely a Christian, a biblical idea that is meant to transform our world by transforming our hearts, minds and souls.
We as Catholics should take heart that rather than picking and choosing the laws we follow, they are purified in holding these two as the most important. I challenge you to read Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Exodus and Numbers and not be heartened by the liturgical and ritual laws that are reflected in our altars, our tabernacles, our scripture, our Passover Meal, our temples. Without these, we cannot learn to love God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind. Without these we cannot truly enter the spirit of not oppressing the alien, of loving our neighbor as ourselves, of not extorting others.
And so all the laws and the prophets, too, depend upon these two. That is a strong statement, but there is reason we plant these ideas deeply in our children, deeply in our own lives. Hopefullly, our children all can respond to the question, have it on their lips, and in their hands, what are the two great commandments? More importantly our witness, our model of them, as spoken of in St. Paul, comes from our lives in the Church and our lives in the world. Really in the end, right worship is not possible without both, love of God and love of neighbor, and social justice is not achievable without right fear of God, and really begins here. Hospitals, schools, orphanages all had their beginnings in a desire to know, love and serve God. This is what we are called to do!
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http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20201208_patris-corde.html
http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html