There are times when Jesus had a great instinct for simplifying things. In his time, we are told that there were more than 600 laws that devout Jews were supposed to know and follow, dietary rules, rules about behavior, more than half were things that you were simply never to do. Sometimes it seems like Catholics have also been extremely good at lists like this, prayers to say, activities to avoid, attendance requirements. There are almost 3,000 numbered paragraphs in our catechism explaining what we believe and how we should live.
So it might seem like it is something of a relief for Jesus to say in today’s gospel that really, not to throw out all the other laws and recommendations, but if you could remember two things and get them right, love God completely, and love your neighbor as you yourself are loved, we could think that was liberating.
But of course, in practice, I think we find these two commandments harder than the other 600 that Jesus doesn’t mention here. The fact is, it’s actually much easier to have lists of things to do and not to do than it is to have two commandments that tell us that love is the answer to life. But it turns out that love is what God is after from us, and there is seemingly no limit to the kind of love God wants to see alive and active in this world.
It’s very hard to feel like we are successes meeting the standards of these two great commandments. Because here’s the problem, we don’t know if we can always trust love. Loving God means that we have to really trust that God loves us, the way we are, and many of us find it hard to feel in our hearts for sure, every day, that that is really how God is.
It’s hard for us to love God as much as this commandment asks us to if we don’t really feel that God has loved us that much first, and many of us really find it hard to feel that deeply. Why love God if we are not always so sure that God loves us?
That’s the same reason it’s hard for us to love others, too, because while we might be able to picture God as (theoretically at least) completely reliable, we know for sure that people are not. Love involves being generous to people who maybe don’t really deserve it, we can never be sure, and what God is really asking us is not to care about whether someone deserves our love or not.
Just take that example from the first reading from the book of Exodus. It says we should welcome and love aliens who come to live among us, because that is how we would want to be treated in the same situation. And yet we know how hard it is to offer unconditional love again and again to total strangers, we know that there has to be a limit to it. And yet these two commandments tell us to go ahead, just to trust, we won’t be sorry.
Really, wouldn’t it be easier to have the 600 laws to follow, ridiculous as some of them would seem to us? It would give us the illusion that we have eliminated risk from our relationship with God and our relationship with the rest of the world. But love is about trust, about believing that the God who sent Jesus to be with us in this world will never let us down if we simply look at where Jesus would have gone, the people he would have been with, and follow him there.
Jesus knew this was hard. In another place in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says that in an age where wickedness is multiplied, most people’s love will grow cold. And maybe that describes every age, there’s so much to discourage us and make us angry in this world that we withdraw to where we think we are going to be safe and we find people to blame for why things are the way they are. These two commandments will come to seem either too hard or not very realistic.
Maybe we should just remember that what we’re being asked to do is the same thing as the old song from the 1940s, Taking a Chance on Love. If Fr. Tim were giving this homily he’d probably sing a little of it for you but I’ll leave it to your imagination. Love is always a risk, and God wants people who become fully alive by taking those risks. Trust that love is the answer to whatever faces us. We’ll never be sorry.