The Greatest Commandment

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus asks us today to keep God at the centre of our lives, to love him with everything we’ve got. This isn’t simply another thing we have to do if we want to get into heaven. Jesus doesn’t want to burden us. The opposite, in fact. Questioned by the Pharisees and Sadducees, Jesus cuts to the heart of things and tells us what’s most important. Our lives flourish when we keep God at the centre. Not a God who demands or makes us feel guilty, but the ‘real, living God’ (as St Paul says) who is with us through everything, who sustains us, and draws us to life. It’s easy to go back to ‘idolatry,’ which is another way of saying that we have something other than God at the centre of our lives. Money, status, the feeling that we’ve earned our ‘success’ and others should too, or even our attachment to thinking that we’re no good. God isn’t angry when we go back to these things. He smiles and offers a hand to help us back to our centre. He is our strength, as the psalmist sings. Imagine discovering this in our own lives, so that we too could say with joy, ‘I love you, Lord, my strength…the rock where I take refuge.’ 

As we begin to know how deeply God loves us, how radically he is on our side, we reflect that this is who God is for others too. Today, Jesus is asked only about the greatest commandment, and he could stop here, but he doesn’t. He goes on to say something surprising, that the second commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself, and that this commandment resembles the first. Jesus is saying that loving God is like loving your neighbour, that these two things resemble one another. In a similar way, God reminds us in the first reading from the Book of Exodus that we must take care of the most vulnerable in our society. We must not take another’s cloak, because God cares that he has something to sleep in. Neither should we molest or oppress the stranger (asylum seeker or refugee might be an appropriate modern translation), because we ourselves have been or could be in a similar position. It’s easy to take this as a rebuke (at least for me) and to think that we must slavishly do more, so that God doesn’t get angry with us. But I don’t think this is how Jesus means us to take his words. Instead, he wants to draw us into the dynamic of God’s love, which opens out to include us all; and he hopes that, swept up in this love, we will reach out to others and include them too, until no one is left outside. So, perhaps this Sunday we could pray for the grace to know God’s love for us, and, transformed by this love, to forget ourselves in loving him and others too.  

Mr Sam Dixon nSJ

Sam is a Jesuit Novice currently on a six-week experiment at Farm Street Church.