At times in the gospel, we have to be grateful to Jesus, because he had a marvelous 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. So it might seem like it was something of a relief for Jesus to say that really, not to throw out the other 600 laws, but if you could get two of them right, love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and to be told that if you do that, you’re not far from the kingdom of God, that’s liberating. This was an unusual scribe Jesus was talking with, someone whose business it was to know all those laws, and yet who realized that they were not all of equal importance, who was willing to say that God possibly doesn’t get that much pleasure from burnt sacrifices, what God wants more than anything is our love, our love for God, and to see us genuinely love one another.
It’s the same for us today, many of us feel like we don’t know enough about our faith, or that we couldn’t explain it to someone else. There are almost 3,000 numbered paragraphs in our catechism explaining what we believe and how we should live, and to think that really, if we get these two things right, that we can feel good about where we stand, that’s almost un-Catholic, isn’t it? Just two commandments to be considered a citizen in good standing by Jesus Christ himself.
Before we feel too relieved, though, about the simplicity of what Jesus is saying here, we have to remember the way Jesus saw the state of this world we live in. On the surface what Jesus is asking for sounds very peaceful and simple, but he is involving us in something much bigger.
Because when you read the gospels, it’s impossible not to realize that Jesus saw this world in the hands of a power that needs fighting against, and he is enlisting us in building the kingdom that is going to be the alternative to that power. Sometimes we see this power that we are fighting, we saw it last week in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, we see it in wars that go on for years and deprive people of the basics of life, we see it when people are demonized and shunned and feared. We don’t know what to call this power sometimes, but we see what love is up against, and we don’t see how love is going to win. But the kind of love Jesus is asking for here overcomes anything. He’s not asking us for an even-tempered, mild-mannered patience with everyone, or leaving people alone the way we would mostly like to be left alone. Instead, the love he’s talking about is love that is totally focused on God and others, love on behalf of people who are hurting and who have nothing and no one else. And in this battle, our weapon is not a rule book but a love that always asks ourselves the question, what if that were me? What would I want to have happen if I were that person? If I were that person who is coming up here from Central America, that person whose long illness is so discouraging and unfixable, that person who stands for things I don’t believe in. How would I want to be treated, what would I hope for? We may not be able to fix any of those situations, we don’t know how to and maybe we can’t, but acts of love towards others are the sign we need in this world of another way of life, of that other kingdom that is still on its way.
This one commandment is not such an easy commandment to follow, as it turns out. Simple doesn’t mean easy. What is going to save us from discouragement, from giving up? If we only had the second part as our work, loving our neighbor as ourself, we could never do it. But we already have a gift of love from God to do this. This commandment says that all God wants is a relationship of love with us, and our first job in life, before anything else, is to realize that we already have it.
God isn’t on the sidelines waiting for us to take the lead here, saving the world by ourselves. We can’t fight this fight on our own and we aren’t. God is already at work in this attempt to have love take over. The love you have already experienced from God in your life, the love that is poured out here in this church when we are together, the love that God already showed for this world on the cross, it’s all on our side. Love has already redeemed this world and us. In that first reading we heard today from the Old Testament where we heard these two commandments laid out for the people of Israel, God had already brought these people to the edge of the promised land, and that’s where we are, too. We’re not working ourselves out of a hole against impossible odds. We have work to do, but it’s as if we should realize that God has already overcome death for us. Our relationship with God is already so powerful that we can turn to it no matter what needs to be done.
We know it, and yet, we lose heart. We’re human. We will always at times feel like the odds are against love in this world. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says that in an age where wickedness is multiplied, most people’s love will grow cold, and some days it does seem as if that’s true. Last month our church canonized St. Oscar Romero, who gave his life fighting this fight. He said, Let us never tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world. So again today we ask God to keep our love from growing cold, and to give us some fire to put love to work where it’s needed most.