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Dear Parish Family,
The central theme of today’s readings is the greatest commandment in the Bible, namely, to respond to God’s love for us by loving Him, and then to express that love in action by loving Him living in our neighbor.
The First Reading is taken from a long narrative, Exodus, chapters 19-24, in which the Hebrews, liberated from Egypt, are in the desert of Sinai. God announces His desire to enter a Covenant with the people. Moses is the mediator. God manifests Himself in terrifying thunder, lightning and clouds. God gives the terms of the Covenant in various paragraphs, on several occasions. The people assent to the terms. These include the familiar Ten Commandments, the paragraphs that elaborate the commandments in great detail, ritual prescriptions and much more. This is the context of today’s first reading which is taken from a section of Exodus dealing with the laws of social conduct, especially the social ethic based, not just on justice, but on a compassion like God’s, resulting from the love they are to have for their underprivileged fellow-human beings. The Law of Moses civilized the Jews, instilling in them the idea that it was wrong to oppress an alien or take advantage of the poor, things they themselves had suffered, because their God cared for widows and orphans and wanted them to do the same. The result was that the ancient Jews began to build an excellent, humane society rooted in the basic religious concept that loving God necessarily involves loving one’s neighbor. At every Seder meal they will be reminded that once in their history, they were slaves and refugees and God liberated them out of compassion and they in turn NOW must be compassionate. Later Judaism developed a ‘ghetto mentality’ and ruled that a neighbor was ONLY a fellow Jew in need and they could overstep the restrictions of Sabbath to help one in need. Jesus will reverse this narrow mindset with his famous story of the Good Samaritan.
In answer to the question of the ‘greatest commandment’ Jesus cited the first sentence of the Jewish Shema prayer: … “Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Then He added its complementary law: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Finally, He declared that the “whole Law and the prophets” depended on the commands to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind” and to love “your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus combined the originally separate commandments and presented them as the essence of true religion. The uniqueness of Jesus’ response consisted in the fact that he understood the two laws as having equal value or importance. We are to love our neighbor and our self as a way to love God: God gives us our neighbors to love so that we may learn to love Him. God contacts us daily through our neighbors. Thus, Jesus proclaims that true religion loves God both directly and as living in our neighbor. Biblical love of God is responsive gratitude for, and remembrance of, what God has done for us, rather than an independent project we undertake for God. “Without the love of neighbor, the love of God remains a barren emotion; and without the love of God, love of neighbor is but a refined form of self-love.” Reginald H. Fuller.
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.