The greatest commandment
Today’s gospel is one scripture passage that should be close to the hearts of all Christians, after all, when our Lord Jesus Christ came down to earth to save us from our sins, he capsulated the Decalogue a.k.a. the Ten Commandments into one that he calls the Greatest Commandment amongst all the Commandments that God put together in the stone tablet that was given to Moses. Actually, I can’t remember anymore in my more than 5 years of writing a layman’s homily that I wrote about this scripture passage. You can read it in Matt.22: 34-40, which is a short one.
“34 When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them [a scholar of the law] tested him by asking, 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and the first commandment. 39 The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
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There is no question that the answer of our Lord Jesus Christ to the question of the scholar of the Law (in today’s time, he is a Canon lawyer) is the reply of most devout Jews because this is the teaching in the Torah of the Jews, which they call the “Shema” in Hebrew, which goes, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength”. This is the prayer of every devout Jew when he awakes in the morning and before he sleeps at night. This is a Jew’s profession of faith.
For us Catholics… we’ve long accepted the Jews as our elder brothers and our Holy Bible contains the books of the Torah and since our Lord Jesus Christ has pointed out to the scholars that the greatest commandment is contained in the Shema… therefore we Catholics should also learn to recite or memorize the Shema as our profession of faith… and thus we are united with our Jewish brethren in this prayer of the greatest commandment.
So now is the right time to ask our faithful readers… have you internalized the Shema? Have you taken the position of the devout Jew who recites the Shema twice a day… first when he wakes up and at night before retiring to bed? Yes this question that begs for an answer if at all, we have even started to learn to love God with all our soul, our mind and our strength?
But our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t stop with the first commandment. He adds, “The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So if you analyze this command very carefully, it is not enough for Catholics to love God alone as we have to love our neighbors as ourselves. So let’s shift this question to the love of our neighbors and ask what have you done for your neighbors lately? Of course, by neighbor, our Lord Jesus Christ is saying to love our fellowman…not just the folks who live in our neighborhood.
So let’s examine our respective consciences… whether we have learned to love our neighbor as ourselves as mandated by our Lord Jesus Christ? Look around you and you will see brother fighting against brother, sister against sister, mother or father against their children and where does loving our neighbors come into this equation? From my simple understanding of this passage, if we fail to love our neighbors, we have committed the sin of omission, which we all know is just as bad as committing a sin.
Just think… our Lord Jesus Christ even teaches us to love our enemies and do good to those who harm you. If you only love your friends and family… even pagans do that! Come now, who ever said that Christianity was an easy religion? You first have to love God, then your neighbors and then even your enemies! But then we always think as humans do and not as God does. This is why this teaching is hard to do, but not impossible.
In the past, Catholics were taught to fear God… using the Ten Commandments that give us many “Thou Shalt Not’s” and if we break any one of these Ten Commandments, we will all go to a life of eternal damnation. But somehow the Catholic Church has now focused on the Love of God and his Divine Mercy. In fact, during the long reign of St. John Paul II, he instituted the Feast of the Divine Mercy, which comes exactly as week after Easter Sunday. It was perfectly timed to emphasize that our Lord came down from heaven to earth to die for our sins and to rise and redeem us with his blood.
If you read the life and times of our Lord Jesus Christ and truly believed that he is the Son of God who was sent to become man to redeem mankind from their wicked ways. Then we owe a lot to God for his love for man, despite our sinful ways. If we further believe that it was God who put our soul when we were conceived… then it would be easy for us to love this God that we cannot see, because after all, in putting our soul into our flesh, he has truly become our Father.
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