Oct. 29: 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ex 22:20-26; Ps 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51; 1 Thes 1:5-10; Mt 22:34-40

This Sunday’s readings bring us back to the basic conviction of our Christian faith. The Gospel selection is a key text from the Gospel of Matthew. 

Jesus’ opponents are again on the attack and “test” Jesus by asking his view about an issue often debated in first-century Judaism: “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” For the devout Jew, including Jesus himself, the Mosaic law expressed God’s will for his people, so probing what is the most fundamental command of all was a burning question.  

Jesus’ answer is striking, all of it drawn from the Old Testament — the Word of God revered by all observant Jews. The “greatest and the first” commandment Jesus quotes is from the Book of Deuteronomy, a passage that was recited each day in the synagogue, the famous “Shema” from the Hebrew word to “listen”: “Listen, O Israel, You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  

Loving God with all our being is the greatest commandment. (That is echoed in the beautiful response Psalm 18 assigned for today: “I love you, O Lord, my strength, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.”) But Jesus doesn’t stop there and this is something characteristic of Jesus and not found in other literature of the time. He focuses on the command to love God, a command “that is like it,” that is, love of neighbor. Jesus again quotes Scripture, this time from the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  

Jesus adds one final comment: “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” The Greek word translated here as “depend” is literally “hangs.” In other words, every other command of the law “hangs on,” is based on, is expressive of, the command to love God and neighbor.  

Here we have the pulsating heart of Jesus’ teaching and the absolute center of the Christian life. All of our life and all of our actions are to be animated by love, love of God and love of neighbor.

We hear echoes of this fundamental teaching in the other readings assigned for this Sunday. A powerful text from Exodus urges that the Israelites should never “molest or oppress an alien”; nor should they “wrong any widow or orphan.” Likewise, those who extort “your poor neighbors among my people” will feel God’s wrath.  

The Lord’s words are cast in a touching way — if a poor person uses his only cloak as collateral for a loan, “you shall return it to him before sunset; this cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in?”

The key to all of this comes at the end of the passage: “If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.” The compassion and love of God, especially for the most vulnerable, is the model for all human action and is the basis for Jesus’ command to love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

From time to time, we can get off track about the heart of our Christian faith and get caught in intra-Catholic issues: disputes about certain moral issues; debates about the style of our liturgies, tugs of war between “liberals” and “conservatives.” These are not trivial questions for sure. But the readings today call us back to the heart of it all: How do my decisions and my actions reflect the “first and greatest command” of God?  

The readings also remind us that this command of love is not focused solely inward but is to motivate the Christian mission to the world. We are to care for the “alien,” the “widow and orphan,” the “neighbor who is poor.” 

Paul, in the second reading today, commends the Christians of Thessaloniki for being “a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia (the southern part of Greece).” The biblical love command is not gauzy sentimentalism but calls for strong, sometimes controversial action and bold courage.