Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 22, 2020: You shall love the Lord, your God, and your neighbor as yourself...

You shall love the Lord, your God, and your neighbor as yourself…

What does right relationship look like?

   When, in the Book of Exodus, God establishes his covenant with the people, God mandates social laws that prescribe the compassionate care of those less fortunate.  Widows, orphans, resident aliens, the poor:  all of these live in a state of utter dependence, and the compassion the people should extend to them has its origin in God himself.  If your neighbor cries out to me, I will hear him, for I am compassionate, God tells the people.  The people must live in right relationship with other – with neighbors and alien residents alike – in order to live in right relationship with God.  Moreover, to be in right relationship with God makes life extraordinary because it means that God is involved in our lives, supports us, and blesses us, as Psalm 18 recognizes: I love you, O Lord, my strength, O Lord, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.  We are to embrace our absolute dependence on God and, in it, our absolute love for God, our foundation in all things, a love that flows out from us to other.

   That love for God and for other is at the center of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees, who challenge him in Matthew’s Gospel to identify the greatest commandment.  His response is the Shema Yisrael:  You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  No aspect of our self is excused from relationship with God; we are to love with the whole of our being.  And that absolute love for God is the context for loving our neighbor as ourselves thanks to that love that overflows abundantly to other.  The Thessalonians were, in this sense, a model for all believers; their embrace of the kingdom, their acceptance of God’s perfect love, allowed them to give witness to that love.  From them the word of the Lord sounded forth as a joyful witness to the blessings to be found in right relationship with God and with other.  May we give similar witness to the power of that love in our lives and the joy it brings to be in right relationship with the Lord.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, November 4, 2018: You shall love the Lord, your God...

 You shall love the Lord, your God… 

How do you love God? 

   In the Jewish tradition, the Shema is a central and indeed essential prayer:  You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, Moses tells the people in the Book of Deuteronomy, for the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  Unlike other religions of the time, Judaism was grounded in relationship with one and only one God, in a love that was to transcend all others, intimate and singular.  King David knows this when he prays in Psalm 18, I love you, Lord, my strength.  The Hebrew word he uses is raham, which denotes womb love, a mother’s love for the child she carries – an intimate and singular connectedness. David recognizes and celebrates this intimate connectedness with the Lord, expressing his own love in response to God’s infinite love for him.

   When, in Mark’s Gospel, one of the scribes challenges Jesus to state which is the first of all the commandments, Jesus returns to the Shema, the commandment to love God before all else.  The scribe is familiar with the 613 commandments of the Torah, but Jesus foregrounds one only:  the injunction to love God with our entire being, to focus on that intimate connectedness in relationship that God seeks.  Such love is more important than laws, or sacrifices, or priestly duties, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us:  Jesus has no need to offer sacrifice day after day because he has restored the people to intimate relationship with God through the sacrifice of his own self, once and for all, sealing the relationship permanently.  Jesus died that all might live – and live to the fullest that intimate relationship that is ours through him.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordle.net

Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 29, 2017: You shall love the Lord, your God, and your neighbor as yourself...

 You shall love the Lord, your God, and your neighbor as yourself… 

Can love effect transformation in your life? 

   From the time of the Book of Exodus, it has been clear that God expects God’s people to have compassion for others.  Having given Moses the Ten Commandments, God proceeds to relate a lengthy series of additional instructions to the prophet, a substantial number of which have to do with the Israelites’ treatment of their neighbors.  You shall not molest or oppress an alien, God intones:  the Israelites must care for widows and orphans alike, as well as for the poor and vulnerable.  Their justice must be God’s justice, with compassion as their first principle.  God has loved them, and so are they to love others.  If God is our strength, as Psalm 18 suggests, we must emulate God’s care for us and give thanks for it by loving all those we meet.

   Jesus will return to this message in Matthew’s Gospel, when he is challenged by the Pharisees to identify which commandment in the law is the greatest.  His response to them – You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind – goes straight to the primacy of love of God and other.  We are, Jesus tells the Pharisees, to live lives of love, with all we have and all we are, holding nothing back.  It is a lesson Paul knows the Thessalonians have mastered, as they have become a model for all believers.  They have taken the Gospel to heart, not just proclaiming the word, but living it, even amidst affliction.

   Are we willing to allow ourselves to be transformed through the love of God?  Are we ready to effect transformation in others?  Are we willing for others to effect transformation in us?  To do so, we must start by recognizing Jesus not only in Eucharist, but in all others around us, and to allow their love to transform our lives as our love and compassion transform theirs.  Only then are we living the essential commandments of our faith.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  Wordle

Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 26, 2014: You shall love...

You shall love...

Whom do you love?

Concern for others has long been a tenet of social justice, even before the term social justice came into existence.  In our reading from Exodus this Sunday, Moses is charged with bringing the Law to the people of Israel, a Law that spells out what their interactions with others should look like.  Concern for aliens, widows, and children is paramount:  If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry… The same holds true for their treatment of all of their neighbors:  they are to live as if others in this world matter, because they matter in the eyes of God, the Lord tells Moses.  And your relationship with Other has everything to do with your relationship with God.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus condenses four entire chapters of Exodus into two fundamental commandments that ultimately say the very same thing:  You shall love the Lord, your God… and your neighbor as yourself.  These two laws define all the rest:  God demands that we love God and other, both.  If you love God with all that you are, you can’t help but love your neighbor as well.  If you don’t extend love to your neighbor, then you probably don’t love God entirely.  Yes, we should exclaim, as the psalmist does in Psalm 18, I love you, o Lord, my strength, but we must also open our hearts to those around us, our neighbors … all of our neighbors. 

The Thessalonians understood this message:  their love for God is so utterly grounded in their love for Other that it is recognized everywhere they travel to proclaim the word:  they themselves openly declare, Paul says, what sort of reception we had among you.  The Thessalonians are living the love Christ brings; they have opened their hearts, and their lives, and that openness is proclaimed throughout the region. Isn’t this precisely what we as Christians are meant to do?  To open our own hearts so that we might transform the existence of those around us by bringing the love – and the Word – of God to bear upon others’ lives, and hearts?

Whom do you love enough to transform with the love God has for you?

This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
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