NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 30 in Ordinary Time Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time. I'm afraid that with today's Gospel we've jumped again. We've jumped over a session in which Jesus is challenged rather rudely by the Sadducees. It's a mocking challenge with which he sees them off, and it's in the light of that that the Pharisees come up to Jesus to question him. In fact, the Pharisees are rather pleased that he's seen off the Sadducees, who were their ideological enemies. So I suspect that their testing him here is less trying to trap him than trying to see if he's more like one of them. It's a different sort of testing. But in any case, in order to understand where we are, I'd like to take us back a little bit, just to remind us of the overall context, because this is the third of Jesus's great answers in the Temple, and that's really important, as I'll explain. You remember that all of this discussion has taken place in the Temple. It's since Jesus came in and the authorities asked him, "By what authority do you do these things, and who gave you this authority?" That's when he taught them the parables. After those parables have come these three questions: the one about the payment of tax, which we saw last week, and Jesus not only answered it technically but also established something that will never be lost — the non-rivalry of God with any form of human dominion or power, and therefore the relativization and non-sacrality of any earthly power. In his answer to the Sadducees — which was again a particular kind of rather insulting trap, and that kind of insult was a known way of conducting debates at the time — he both established once again the complete separation of God from any kind of rivalry with human life or death, but also relativized any sort of sacrality concerning human marriage. That marks a definitive rupture which, over time, will allow us to become married and to work out what is good for ourselves over time. And the third response is this great response today. A little bit of background. There were genuine discussions amongst the different schools of interpretation of law at the time of Jesus as to which was the greatest of the commandments. And the answer which Jesus gives is well within the terms of reference of those discussions. But he does something rather remarkable, and which we will have reason to think on. Remember, this is the person who is being questioned as to by whose authority he does these things, and who gave him this authority. And his answer has been to try to get them to say — "you are he" — in other words, to recognize that this is in fact God himself teaching in his Temple, shortly before being executed, shortly before his lynch death. And what he does here is he establishes once again a definitive and unbreakable answer forever: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength." He's quoting here from the book of Deuteronomy, possibly with a reference to the book of Joshua, Joshua 22, where this is explained in similar terms. And then he's adding to that a commandment from the book of Leviticus about love of neighbor — Leviticus 19 — and he's saying that they are similar. That's the key phrase. They cannot be separated. Love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. There is no such thing as loving God if you do not love your neighbor. In as far as you love neighbor, you love God. This is an anthropological revolution. Whereas in the previous two answers he showed the complete lack of rivalry of God with any form of human worldliness — if you like, whether of power or of marital history — here he brings together God and the human to say that there will henceforth be no difference. In as far as you do it to God, you do it to your neighbor; in as far as you do it to your neighbor, you do it to God. And he'll then explicate more in the parable of the sheep and the goats. But here he's setting for once and for all time the word that shall never pass away: that any form of dealing with God that does not adhere strictly to the consequences for humans is a fake form of dealing with God. You love God in as far as you love humans. "If you say you love God but yet hate your brother, you lie," as John would say later. So this is the establishment — and it's an establishment not of something, if you like, that is simply a legal answer, as I think our first reading from the book of Exodus shows. What Jesus is doing is so much more than giving a legal answer. He is revealing the heart of God. The heart of God is passionate about the precarious, the weak, the outsider, the resident, the stranger, the person whom you might ignore. Passionate in love for those people. And it's only as you learn, as I learn, as we learn as humans to reach out constantly to ever increasing degrees of who is our neighbor, that we achieve the heart of God, that we receive the heart of God in us and spread it to others. It's this longing that is at the heart of this — the love of God and of neighbor. It's interesting that both here and in Mark's Gospel, Jesus just gives the answer with love of God, with love of neighbor. It's only in St Luke that, if you like, the necessary question is put by the lawyer — which is, "Who is my neighbor?" — inviting Jesus to take it further, which he then does, bringing out that it's not only the close neighbor, the insider, but it's the outsider neighbor whom you have to treat as well. In other words, the tendency of this is universal. Ultimately, what Jesus is inducting us into is an understanding of being human such that there should never be an outside other to us, never should be someone who dwells in shame, someone who dwells in precariousness. God's project of love is towards all of those. There is nothing that can ever undo that teaching of God himself, in God's temple as a human being, saying it is only in as far as you love your neighbor as yourself that you love God. So let's rejoice. For me, this Gospel is a matter of rejoicing. It's not so much a question of a legal answer; it's the definitive establishment on earth of an unbreakable principle. We're invited into this adventure of love of God and love of neighbor. How far can we take it? In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.