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10/31 - 31th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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Dear Parish Family,
The Holiness Challenge
One of the striking features of the Gospel narratives is that all the four Gospels shift to a high gear of conflicts and confrontations in the last week of Jesus’ life. Jesus was confronted by several groups of religious leaders—first by the chief priest, scribes and elders who had questioned His authority; then by the Pharisees who tried to turn the people against Him by ensnaring Him in a controversy; and finally, by the Sadducees, who tried to make Him look foolish with trick questions. In each case, Jesus responded with a wisdom and authority so powerful all opponents were stunned in amazement. They had come to battle wits with the Son of God; and lost in every encounter. A scribe, who believed in both the written Law and the oral tradition, was pleased to see the defeat Jesus had dealt to the Sadducees who had presented for solution the hypothetical case of a woman who had married seven husbands. Who, they had asked Jesus, would be her husband in the world to come? To the scribes, the Mosaic Law was the greatest, fullest, and most perfect revelation of God’s will that could ever be given. However, in the Judaism of Jesus’ day there was a double tendency: to expand the Mosaic Law into hundreds of rules and regulations and to condense the 613 precepts of the Torah into a single sentence.
The summation of the Law comes from Deuteronomy 6:4. It is called the Shema Israel. This was the ancient prayer that was and is said by the Jewish people every morning and every evening. It is a prayer that they kept in a packet at their doors so they could take it with them wherever they go. "Shema Israel, Hear O Israel, You shall love the Lord with your whole heart, whole mind and whole soul." Jesus added something to that prayer, a part of another verse from another book of the Hebrew Bible. From Leviticus 19:18, Jesus added: "and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."
The great contribution of Jesus is that he combined the originally separate commandments and presented them as the essence of true religion – the holiness challenge! True religion, Jesus says, is loving God by loving service. That is, the only way a person can demonstrate real love for God is by showing genuine, active love for neighbor. The “great commandment in the Law” is threefold: We are commanded (1) to love God, (2) to love our neighbor, and (3) to love ourselves. We are to love God, for it is in loving Him that we are brought to the perfection of His image in us. We are to love our neighbor and ourselves as well because both of us bear God’s image, and to honor God’s image is to honor Him who made it. We are to love our neighbor and our self as the pathway to the love of God: God gives us our neighbors to love so that we may learn to love Him.
Jesus' simple statement embraces everything we need to do to serve God. And yet, it demands a radical change in our lives and a radical change in our whole perception of religion. Every action of our lives is included in this law. We are all made in God's image and likeness. We are called to reverence the Lord in the many ways in which he is present in his world. When we love other people, we are loving people who themselves are unique reflections of the presence of God. We cannot love God and hate others. Sometimes people say that they pray hard, they come to Church often, but they don't feel they are making any progress in their spiritual life. Maybe we all feel this way at times. Perhaps, when we feel this way, we need to ask ourselves if we are at peace with other people. We may not like someone, but if we are full of hatred for someone, we are destroying the love of God within us.
With God’s blessings,
Fr Tom Kunnel C.O.