30TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME 2005
October 26, 2008
Matthew 22, 34-40
Today we listen to an argument between Jesus and some Pharisees. They have literally ganged up against him, in a huddle, to see if they can embarrass him publicly. They want to question him, to put him to a public test, in the hope that he cannot answer their question. The gospel says that they ‘tempted’ him – only they and the devil are said to do so in Matthew.
Mark’s gospel puts the situation differently. In Mark, the question is put by a scribe who is positive to Jesus, and Jesus says he is ‘not far from the kingdom of God’. In Matthew’s time, there are no longer – since the fall of Jerusalem - any Sadducees or Zealots with any influence, there are only Pharisees, and they are not positive to the early Christian movement. One of them, an expert in the legalities of the Torah, probably a Rabbi, puts the question.
He says: what kind of commandment is the greatest in Torah? [This question was not original. Rabbis loved to ask it of one another. There are 613 commandments in the Torah, and it was a kind of game to pick out the one that you considered the ‘greatest’. Hillel, one of the greatest of Jewish scholars, had already answered the question – almost exactly in the words that Jesus uses here! We do not have enough evidence to decide if Jesus knew the position of Hillel and used it, or if it is Matthew who knew it and puts it on the lips of Jesus in his gospel. It could be a wonderful retort from Jesus to Pharisees – replying in the words of one of their own, indeed one of their greatest scholars….]
The important thing is to ponder Jesus’ reply. ‘Listen, Israel! The Lord your God is one. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind. That is the greatest commandment. But the second is like it: you must love your neighbour as yourself’.
The primordial commandment here is: LISTEN! Shema! It is the first word of the most basic prayer of Israel, recited several times a day by a true Jew. Listen – hear and heed, strain forward and lean upon and trust and rely upon something you don’t have access to without attentiveness. Don’t even think about the law unless you do that first… When Pope Benedict visited New York last April, he went to a synagogue, and was greeted with the singing of the Shema. Israel said to the Christian Pope: “Listen!”
What do you hear when you listen? The Lord your God is One. We are talking about Yahweh, the God of Israel. Israel was not permitted to pronounce that divine name. They used a circumlocution, ‘the Lord’ (Adonai). When you listen, you discover this unpronounceable One. And your basic discovery is – that this (unsayable) Lord is ONE. Not just that there is only one God. Rather that the one God has a ONENESS in that GodSelf that is unique, and that is the secret of all reality. Listen, you might hear it. Listen, and make it the centre of your life.
As you do, remember that this mystery of ONENESS is – yours. The Lord is your Lord. The ONENESS is in a living relationship with you, is intimate with you, is within you. Personally. With a demand of reciprocity. With an invitation to intimacy. With a request for your integrity, as a return gift.
That is why you must Love the Oneness of the One that loves you. The first and greatest commandment is not to do anything out there, anything definable, or not to avoid anything out there or definable. It is to love. It is a matter of affect. It is a feeling towards, a being drawn with your whole being towards the One that you love and that loves you. If Israel doesn’t do that, Israel is not the Israel of God. It has not listened to its own prayer.
If you do love that Oneness that loves you, your love does something to you. It changes you. You focus your all on the One. You love with all your heart, and soul, and mind. And you discover in yourself a unity and an integrity you never knew and never actually had. You are like the One you love. You are the image of your God. You have found yourself in the very moment when you stopped looking for yourself and listened to your God. This, and this alone, is living Torah.
When Jesus says, the second commandment of the Torah is like the first, he means it is actually equal in weight and importance to the first. It is not ‘second’ – it is a dead-heat for first. And it is not about loving the whole world, or loving anything abstract, or loving something far away (or loving needy people in Africa or the Middle East or Asia, or giving some money to a collection for them). It is about loving your neighbour. Loving in the sense we have just seen. Listening to the neighbour. Discovering in the neighbour the Oneness of God who loves your neighbour as God loves you. Orienting your all to your Godded neighbour, with all your heart and soul and mind. And remember, this is the neighbour next door, in this street, who doesn’t seem to be a pretty face. And who perhaps doesn’t seem to keep Torah. But who is filled with the Oneness and the Love of your God. You can’t love one without the other. You can’t break up that Oneness. They go together. This is what Covenant really means – God has become the God of all of you, and all of you must become the one, not the scattered many, that God loves and owns. It is not an optional extra. It is not a matter of compassion when the neighbour has some need. It is a demand of the justice of this kind of God, this kind of given Oneness, this kind of Love. It is the Golden Rule.
Keep it, and you will be One with God. And God is already One with you, all of you.
This is not just about Israel and Christianity. It is about Islam too. A group of 138 Islamic scholars (from 43 countries) has written an open letter to the Christian community about this. It is about the core common ground between Christianity and Islam. That common ground is love of God and love of neighbour. It is a unique devotion to the God who is Love and who is Love for all our neighbours together. They have extended a hand of friendship and conviviality and cooperation to the Christian community. A similar group of Christian scholars has replied, and extended its hand to them in return. The Christians have begun by asking forgiveness for past attitudes to Islam, from the All-Merciful One, and from the Muslim world community.
On November 4th – 6th this year, a delegation of leaders and theologians from Islamic countries will be in Rome, to enter dialogue with Catholic leaders and theologians about the first and greatest commandment. There will be 24 in each group. The Pope will meet them. The first day is to be about the foundations of the love commandment in each tradition. The second day is about the sense of human dignity, and respect for it, that stems from those foundations. The third day is open, and it is open to the public too. We pray that they will be one…in one Love…of one God. It is a historic step, and will do much for the peace of the world.