The confrontation continues in the Gospel Reading for today. As the liturgical year draws close to its end, the lectionary focuses on Jesus teaching in Jerusalem after his triumphal entry into the city and before the beginning of his passion. As we have seen in prior reflections, the situation is highly charged, because the Israelites are having to celebrate the Passover, the feast of their liberation from Egypt, while living under Roman occupation.
The religious leaders, most of whom oppose Jesus, are taking turns to try to defeat him either by riling the crowds up against him or by getting him arrested by the Roman soldiers. In last Sunday's Gospel reading, we saw the Pharisees seeking to trap Jesus by asking him about the legitimacy of paying taxes to the Roman Emperor. In the passage immediately following, which is not included in this lectionary sequence, the Sadducees, another group of religious leaders, try to undermine Jesus with a trick question about marriage, but they are rebuffed.
In today's Gospel passage, the Pharisees are back for another confrontation. This time, they ask Jesus to name the greatest commandment from the Mosaic Law, that is to say, the Law of Moses, the law code that God revealed in the Old Testament. Traditionally, 613 commandments have been enumerated as comprising the Mosaic Law. The strategy of the Pharisees in this passage is to get Jesus to commit to naming one of the 613 laws as the most important of them all. They can then try to show that he is wrong, thereby embarrassing him in front of the crowds.
But no scholar of the law could contest the response that Jesus gives: "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 message of Jesus is clear. God is to be at the very center of our lives. Everything that we do, that we say, that we think should be centered on God. God is love and he created the world out of love in order to share his love with us. He created within us an inner hunger, an existential yearning that only his love for us can satisfy. We reach true fulfillment only by centering our lives on God. The more we are God-centered, more complete our lives will become. But the more we turn our backs on God through sin, the more we plunge our lives into misery.
One way to understand sin is that all sin is putting something in the place of God. When we sin, we remove God from our center and make our lives revolve around a created reality. Many sins involve inherently evil things, like hurting other people. But some sins involve things that are good in and of themselves, but which we have put into the center of our lives, making them into an idol. For example, money is good in and of itself. But when we allow our lives to revolve around it, we start to worship money, thereby forming a sinful attachment. We can say the same about food or drinks like wine. They are good and a gift from God. But when we put them in the center, we become guilty of the sin of gluttony.
Without God in the center, we end up having disordered relationships with the created world - with people, objects, and other aspects of reality. But when God is in the center, our relationship with everything and everyone is brought into the correct balance. We will be able to say no to things that are inherently destructive. Moreover, we can appreciate God's gifts in a pure way. We can enjoy a good meal, without falling into gluttony. We can savor a glass of wine, without succumbing to alcoholism. We can love other people with a genuine love, without being toxic, codependent, or possessive.
Which brings us to the second part of the answer Jesus gives in the Gospel passage for this Sunday in answer to the question as to which commandment is greatest. He says: "The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." God loves each of us infinitely. If we are to love God fully, we need to love all others with his love, we need to be channels of his love in the lives of all the people around us.
Furthermore, loving others as ourselves requires a healthy sense of self-love to begin with. Aristotle described virtue as the golden mean between two extremes. For example, courage is the happy medium between cringing fear and reckless bravado. If we have nothing but fear, we cannot accomplish anything. But if we have no fear, we can plunge ourselves into destructive or self-destructive actions. But if we are in the middle between the two extremes, we have just the right mixture to act bravely.
Likewise, healthy self-love is the golden mean between two extremes, between self-loathing and self-idolatry. Hating ourselves is destructive and can lead to horrific consequences. Similarly, self-idolatry is also destructive and can result in dreadful consequences. Healthy self-love accepts that we are fallen, imperfect, and prone to sin. At the same time, healthy self-love accepts that God made us to be fundamentally good and receives fully God's redemptive and restorative love for each of us.
If we are filled with self-loathing and try to love our neighbor as ourselves, as Jesus has commanded us to do, we would only end up hating our neighbor too, which is obviously not what Jesus wants. Likewise, if we idolize ourselves and try to love our neighbor with the same love, we would make an idol out of the other person, putting him or her in the place of God, which would lead to a disordered relationship. Thus, to love our neighbor as Jesus wants us to love, we need to start by loving ourselves in the way that he wants us to do.
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The readings for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
Exodus 22:20-26
Psalm 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10
Matthew 22:34-40
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: The Sea of Galilee (c) 2016 by Zoltan Abraham.