Upon These Two
Thirtieth Sunday of the Year. Fr Richard Joseph Ounsworth preaches on the two greatest commandments.
The command to love one’s neighbour as oneself is taken from the Book of Leviticus, so one might wonder why that has not been chosen as our first reading today. Perhaps looking at the wider context might give us a clue: Leviticus 19:18f reads ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord. You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind. You shall not sew your field with two kinds of seed…’ Perhaps Jesus has succeeded in finding a pearl in the oyster here, a jewel amidst the dross.
And indeed one might make the same claim for the greatest commandment, love of God, which is taken from Deuteronomy. The chapter that follows this commandment tells us ‘When the Lord God gives [the nations] over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Show them no mercy… break down their altars’. This is the same book, of course, that commands the public stoning of misbehaving teenagers, so we might be tempted once again to think ‘thank goodness that Jesus has kept the baby but thrown out the bathwater’.
But such an approach really won’t do. Jesus tells us much earlier in St Matthew’s Gospel that he has not come to abolish the law, not one jot or tittle of it. And in our present passage he says that upon these two great commandments ‘depend all the Law and the Prophets’. They depend, they are not cur off. They are still part of the bigger picture.
What is that big picture? In their different and complementary ways, Deuteronomy and Levitcus are both concerned with the establishment of a people set apart – set apart by ritual, by a shared world of symbols and a shared way of life that has some odd and uncomfortable aspects. This people is set apart to be holy, and to reflect by their holiness the reality of the one true God, the creator, supremely loving and utterly transcendent, not an idol, not one of ‘the gods’, but the One who is entirely beyond human imagining. This is what is meant by ‘holy’ in the Old Testament. Israel is called to share in this holiness, to participate in, reflect and communicate the transcendent perfection, the terrifying beauty and the creative and utterly gracious love of God.
So behind Jesus’s response in today’s Gospel lies this context of the extraordinary supernatural vocation of Israel.
This is one context of today’s Gospel. The other is that this conversation is part of a set of controversies between Christ and his opponents; we are reminded that Jesus has silenced the Sadducees, and now along come the Pharisees, who perhaps perceive Jesus as being basically on their side. But tragically, it is often those most similar to ourselves for whom we reserve the bitterest hatred, and this certainly seems to have been the case with Jesus and the Pharisees. Christ reserves his angriest condemnation for them, and their plotting against Jesus seems to be a large part of what leads him to the Cross.
The tragedy is that the Pharisees almost certainly would have approved of the answer that Jesus gives in today’s Gospel. Yet they will seek to destroy Jesus precisely because he reminds them of Israel’s vocation to be holy, because he also condemns them and their followers for their failre to fulfil that destiny. Ironically, they will cry out ‘crucify, crucify’ against the one man who really does live out the holiness to which Israel is called. Christ along shares perfectly in the holiness of God; Christ alone reflects God’s transcendent beauty; Christ alone communicates God’s perfect and creative love – and indeed he does so most perfectly on the Cross to which his enemies condemn him.
The Cross shows us what it looks like for a man to love God will all his heart and soul and mind. The Cross show us what it looks like to love one’s neighbour as oneself. If all the law and the prophets hang upon these two commandments of love, then the law and the prophets are at last fulfilled with the word made flesh hangs upon the Cross to which these commandments have driven him.
Readings: Exodus 22:21-27 | 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10 | Matthew 22:34-40
