Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Lesson: Ex 22:20-26
Epistle: 1 Thes 1:5c-10
Gospel: Mt 22:34-40
“The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
One of my philosophy professors in college was prone to complaining, “Students love complicated questions. I like simple questions!” This tended to come out when he would pose a query to a member of the class such as, “What do you see outside the window?” and the nervous undergraduate, wary of a epistemic trap, would anxiously reply, “Well, what do you mean by ‘outside’ or ‘see’?” Yet there was no verbal trap. Dr. White simply wanted them to describe what they saw.
In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees pose a questions to Jesus that is at once simple yet complex:
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
From the standpoint of the Christian who is familiar with this Gospel passage, and Our Lord’s reply, this may seem an odd sort of gotcha question. Jesus’ answer below seems so straightforward. However, it is not so ridiculous as it might seem.
For one, the Mosaic Law itself has no explicit priority of its commandments. One might deduce a certain priority of importance, based on the order in which its precepts are presented, but this is not delineated as part of the Law itself. Furthermore, a principle of the Law is that the whole of it must be observed. Even Our Lord affirms that “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place,” (Mt 5:18).
Even more than this, however, it is a question of love. For the Pharisees, and the Jewish people as a whole, adherence to the Law is the expression par excellence of the special relationship between God and His chosen people. Asking a Pharisee to name “the greatest commandment of the Law” would be like asking a married man, “Which feature of your wife is the most attractive?” Even were he to supply an answer out of compulsion, it would not encompass the whole depth of his relationship with his bride.
Jesus, however, chooses to interpret the question different. Because the Law is to be considered as a unitive whole, Our Lord answers the question by summing up the essence of the Law.
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.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
As it turns out, the complex observance of the Mosaic Law is actually quite simple. It all comes down to love of God and love neighbor. This is the simplicity that God desires of us. However, like inexperienced undergraduates, our fallen nature like to introduce complexity into these commandments. We constantly seek, in small ways and large, to hedge and introduce exceptions and qualifications to love of God and love of neighbor.
Consider the first reading of this Sunday’s Mass, taken from the Mosaic Law itself:
Thus says the LORD:
"You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.
You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.
My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword;
then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
"If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
by demanding interest from him.
If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body.
What else has he to sleep in?
If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate."
If human beings could be simple, and receive God’s commandments with childlike docility, the commandments and penalties above would be superfluous. It would simply be enough to know that God desires us to love Him and love our neighbor, and we would behave accordingly.
We rarely comport ourselves in this childlike manner, though. Instead, our actions and attitudes are childish. In the manner of little children, we act like lawyers trying to argue for exceptions. “But Dad…they’re an alien! They’re not really my neighbor…”. “But Dad…that’s my cloak, not his!” The complexity of the Law arises from the complexity of the human heart. The need to forbid the oppression of the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan reflects the human tendency to carve out exceptions from the two great commandments whenever we find them inconvenient or not to our selfish advantage.
God forbid that we ourselves should commit sins of oppression against the poor and the powerless, but all of us must battle every day against excusing ourselves from some portion of the law of love of God and love of neighbor. All of us must exert ourselves not to carve out exceptions to the law of God. We must every day seek to move from a childish way of relating to God to a childlike way of relating to Him. Like those little ones to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs, we must take Jesus completely at His word when He says, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”