Sunday, October 26
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Focus Theme
The Compassionate Life

 Weekly Prayer
Almighty God, your Son has shown us how to love one another. May our love for you overflow into joyous service and be a healing witness to our neighbors through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 All Readings For This Sunday
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 with Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 or
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 with Psalm 1 and
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

 Focus Reading
Matthew 22:34-46

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 'The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”'? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

 Reflection and Focus Questions
by Kate Huey

Focus Questions 1. What is underneath the questions of the Pharisees? 2. Can love be commanded? 3. Is love in this context a feeling or an action? 4. Does Borg's word "relationship" instead of "commandment" change your understanding of this text? 5. Why did Jesus end this long and contentious conversation with a question about the Messiah? Text for Meditation You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. / You shall love your neighbor as yourself. For ideas on how to meditate with the Bible, read our article on Praying With the Bible

This week's passage is only one small piece of a conversation we're overhearing, between Jesus and the religious authorities of his own people. It's a little bit like listening in on a family argument, with higher stakes. The displeased leaders have uncomfortably recognized Jesus' parables as "speaking about them": "They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet" (Matthew 21:45-46). Feeling offended and "disrespected" and perhaps even threatened, they fight back with the only weapons they have: their learning, and their way with words.

Like our modern presidential debates, these exchanges appear polite on the surface, with hard-to-miss tension underneath. In Matthew's account in chapter 22, the authorities "plotted to entrap him" (v.15), and "Jesus, aware of their malice," calls them "hypocrites" (v. 18) and tells them that they "know neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (v. 29). Perhaps we might understand Jesus' hostility if we (as always) consider the setting: after his triumphal procession into Jerusalem, he immediately "cleansed" the temple and confronted the religious leaders who then questioned his authority to teach on their turf. Clearly, they're not fans.

Jesus hasn't applied for a license or passed their test of orthodoxy, and yet his answer to this question about the heart of the law, the heart of his people's tradition, shows that he is an utterly faithful Jew. On round three of theological questions, the Pharisees have sent in their "big gun," as Beverly Zink-Sawyer describes this legal expert, to get to that heart of the matter. Richard Swanson uses the same image: "The Pharisees take their best shot and it misfires. Jesus fires back, and no one bothers to reload." The lawyer has asked a "Do-You-Have-A-Clue-About-Being-Jewish? question," Swanson says, and "Jesus clearly has a clue about being a Jew."

If we use a baseball metaphor instead, we might say that the Pharisees throw Jesus an easy pitch and he hits it out of the park. After all, even though the Pharisees want to trap Jesus in heresy (i.e., saying the other 612 laws are less important), scholars seem to agree that Jesus isn't the first to put together these two laws about loving God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). But as always there's a twist in the way Jesus interprets the tradition, a twist that turns our perspective around today just as much as it "confounds" his listeners long ago. Instead of reducing the importance of the rest of the laws, he paints a picture of them as a coherent whole that "hangs together." Even more, Thomas Long tells us that Jesus sees the law very differently than its experts do, and his response "undermine[s] the whole notion of the law as rules and regulations. What Jesus claims is that the whole law is about love, not rules, about really loving God and one's neighbor, not about figuring out how to avoid stepping on cracks in the legal sidewalk."

We might begin our closer look at these two commandments by asking how humans can indeed be "commanded" to love. And then we might look more closely at how we define love mostly as a feeling that then causes us to behave in a certain way. When we don't feel love, it influences and even justifies our behavior, or our lack of right behavior. We claim that no one can force us to love someone else. "In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused," Douglas Hare writes, "it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deut. 6:5 demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment." And commitment can be seen as a setting of the heart, something we choose to do, a way we freely choose to live our lives. Commitment is that mysterious mingling of feeling and action, a beautiful dance between the two.

An example during this stewardship season in many churches: several years ago, inspired by the witness of two older women, longtime and faithful members of the church who told me their stories of tithing, I decided to take the step of increasing my own giving to the church I loved. Increasing to a tithe was a challenge but it surprised me that my feelings followed after the action, or the commitment, if you will. I found that I loved my church more when I gave more to it, much as we love our children more after giving of ourselves to them over many years. So it seems that when we decide to set our hearts in a direction, toward something or someone, and when we do the things that fulfill that commitment, our feelings often follow afterward. The laws of giving and Sabbath and loving, I believe, are God's way of getting us to do what we need to do, what's good for us; these laws give us the direction for setting our hearts. Again, it's a mysterious thing.

The two great relationships

The great scholar Marcus Borg has famously called these two commandments the "great relationships," and he even ends his excellent book, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, with this "remarkably simple vision of the Christian life. It is not complicated, though it is challenging." It's as if it all comes to this, for "at the center of a life grounded in the Bible is the twofold focus of the great relationship."

So at the heart of being a faithful Jew, and at the heart of being a faithful Christian, we have these two great relationships, intertwined in yet another mysterious mingling for people of faith. Beginning with the second, we know that we're called to love one another, not just the people we feel love for, but all of God's children, which is where justice comes in, what Borg calls "the social form of love" in the Bible. The tradition in which Jesus taught and lived called Israel (as we are called today) to "justice, mercy, and faithfulness, that is, forms of behavior demanded by the prophets but beyond legal regulation," according to Douglas Hare. We know that Jesus interpreted this law of love to cross boundaries in place in his own culture, beyond family or group loyalties, and he ran into trouble for doing so. We might also ask what boundaries we have placed around our own commitment to love our neighbor, which of God's children live on the other side of those boundaries, and how comfortably we live on this side of them, all the while thinking that we too are faithful to the two great commandment/relationships. God didn't mean for us to love those people, right? And yet Jesus made clear the reason we love even the stranger, even the "least" among us: later in MatthewÕs Gospel (the well-known Chapter 25 with its sheep and goats), he said that we will be judged by whether we were able to see him, to see Jesus, to see God, in every single person we encounter, and he describes that love in what we do, not what we feel.

Turning then to the first and greatest commandment, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, we once again consider the orientation, or setting, of the very center of our being. Borg writes of this centering: "Within ancient Jewish psychology, the character of the heart depended upon its orientation, what it was pointed toward or centered in...what mattered was the orientation of the self at its deepest level, its 'center' or fundamental loyalty" (in Jesus: A New Vision). Jesus was a radical, Borg says, in teaching that we are to be centered in the Spirit, and not in the many other things that call for our loyalties, "rival centers" like "family, wealth, honor, and religion." Two thousand years later, we might ask if nationalism has demanded our loyalty in ways that displace the primary importance of God, and if God is indeed first in our hearts and our lives. And we should be prepared to be called a radical, too, if we follow in the way of Jesus of being centered in God.

Our true identity and calling

Two writers (among many) have provided exquisite reflections on these two great commandments. In his work, The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning, Stephen J. Patterson describes the "basic reality" of God as love, for "to love God is to love love itself. That is why Jesus embodied love in his own life in a more radical way than the simple love of neighbor might suggest. He loved prostitutes. He loved sinners, traitors, tax collectors. He treated the shamed with honor and declared the unclean clean. He loved the unlovable. He loved his enemies. To love God is to be devoted to a basic and fundamental reality that runs through all of life and creation." When we're trying to figure out the meaning of life, when we're trying to make sense of everything, Patterson points us toward this "reality that can give life its richness and ultimate meaning. This is the reality that beckons us to live better than we live. This is the reality that exists as already present, an Empire 'within you,' that can be as powerful in the shaping of human life and relationships as we want it to be."

We're not surprised that a mystic like Thomas Merton describes this love in terms of the mystery and hiddenness of God: "To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or joy. To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God" (A Book of Hours, Kathleen Deignan, ed.).

Who is the real Jesus?

The long and contentious debate between Jesus and the religious experts ends, fittingly, with a question about the Messiah, one that is really about Jesus himself. Thomas C. Long writes, "Jesus challenges the completeness of the Pharisees' answer," for "He is David's true son, but he is more. He is Messiah and Lord." Perhaps this reminds us of the incompleteness of all of our understanding, and the human limitations of our ability to love. But Patterson claims that the mysterious power of love comes from God: Jesus, he writes, "embraced that power, lived it, spoke of it, storied it into existence, and surrendered to it, finally accepting its limitations and succumbing to the powers of fear and hatred that crucified him. This is how, even in death, Jesus could become an experience of God to others."

 For Further Reflection

Samuel Johnson, 18th century writer

We are more often required to be reminded than informed.

Blaise Pascal, 17th century philosopher

All the good maxims are already current; what we need is to apply them.

Clement of Alexandria, 3rd century

You have seen your brother; you have seen God.

All quotations from Dale Allison, The Lectionary Commentary, Roger E. Van Harn, ed.