He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Recall back a few weeks when I mentioned our gospels are taken from Jesus final week in Jerusalem before His arrest, death, and burial. The gospels we have read focus on the challenges to Jesus from both the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They tried to trap Jesus with questions about taxes, the resurrection, and today about the greatest commandment. These discourses will go on in the weeks to come, eventually leading to Jesus’ final teachings on the end times.
He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Recall back a few weeks when I mentioned our gospels are taken from Jesus final week in Jerusalem before His arrest, death, and burial.
The gospels we have read focus on the challenges to Jesus from both the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They tried to trap Jesus with questions about taxes, the resurrection, and today about the greatest commandment.
These discourses will go on in the weeks to come, eventually leading to Jesus’ final teachings on the end times.
Perhaps it is our nature, we like to get to the end, to have the point made, to discover the solution, to uncover the mystery.
Jesus has something far more important for us to do, and that is live today. We are to live our faith each day.
Our first reading from Exodus has a powerful waring – and that warning still resonates today: hate someone – no matter who they are, call someone dirty, no good, worthless, a burden, cheat someone, call upon others, including the government, to oppress someone then “My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.”
That is not God speaking poetically or telling a story, it is a promise, a dreadful promise.
Brothers and sisters, you see that our journey through life is fraught with the kind of sins we write off easily. We use metaphors and euphemisms – oh, it’s just politics, I personally would never hurt anyone – yet we rage internally. We let media and politicians put thoughts in our heads because they tickle us and reinforce our sense of not getting a good deal.
Jesus has the answer to that, the solution. That solution begins in our own souls because we are forgiven when we say and do wrong. We are given yet another opportunity to set things right by loving God and our neighbor. We are not put to the sword.
Jesus’ awesome mercy is shown to us each day. We then are to be equally merciful, loving, and forgiving.
St. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, points out the way others talk about them because they lived out their faith, they made it real and everyone saw how they became imitators of the Apostles and of Jesus.
Let people speak of us that way. Remember that there is no book, no agenda, and no script we are called to fulfill other than Jesus’. See how they are imitators of the Apostles and of Jesus.
