Homily for the 21st Sunday after Trinity (30th Sunday of Ordinary Time)

The Lord’s summary of the Law here in Matthew 22 does not cause the crowds to disperse in dismay like the dramatic Bread of Life discourse in John 6; nor does provide the shocking command to enemy love that we hear on the sermon on the mount. It seems familiar to us — certainly especially in our prayer book tradition where we often hear it announced at the beginning of Mass — and it would have seemed familiar to many Jews at the time, as a good summary of the two “tablets” of the Decalogue. I would not go so far as to say that familiarity here breeds contempt, but it does breed a kind of numbness to the real gravity of the commandments, because in summarizing the whole of the Law and the Prophets they also summarize the entire history and tendency of human failure. Going all the way back to Genesis, the first sin is precisely a failure to love God with the whole heart, soul, and mind, when Adam and Eve seek to define good and evil only from their own self-enclosed humanity. And the sin of Cain, only a short time after, is a failure to see that the love of God must show itself in the love of neighbor.

Perhaps our own failures do not always reach these great heights of apostasy and murder, yet the disordering of love touches everything, and we are all the more blind to it because we consciously do love things. We are tempted to love God in an exclusive and puritanical way, treating people as obstacles to that love, or worse, as mere tools to support it. And/or we are tempted to love people, or ourselves and our own desires, in a way that denies the deepest truth of our nature, our identity as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. This is by the way why the second commandment is “like unto” the first; loving God wholly and entirely requires loving God’s image in us and our neighbor.

Peter Kreeft suggests that the modern world tries to divide everything into either purely subjective, personal feelings, or impersonal technology. Even the way that we speak of love often falls into this trap: either it is purely subjective feeling or cold, technological fact. But the God-Man rejects this dichotomy: love is neither a feeling nor a technology, neither irrational emotion nor calculating legalism, but an activity and orientation of our selves and our relationships towards the triune God who is the source of all Being. As Fr. Simeon writes, “No one can love himself or another fruitfully unless he first loves God absolutely. Human love must continually nourish itself from the wellspring of uncreated, eternal love flowing from the Heart of God.”

The idea that all law “hangs” from these central laws is not some kind of simplistic rejection of everything else, as if we must deny all law, custom, rite, observance, and tradition because all we need is love. But all those other things must flow from the love of God and neighbor, which is to say that without these crucial and integral loves the whole structure of Christian faith and life falls apart. “Even worse, given the historical laws governing social and cultural institutions, that edifice may continue to stand physically for a while, although gutted of all living content and utterly sterile in its mission, a mockery of itself” (Fr. Simeon).

That last description, from the ever-insightful Fr. Simeon, could apply as much to the contemporary Pharisees of the internet, taking delight in hurling anathemas right and left, as to the desiccated modern social infrastructures, public and private, which originated in particular Christian concepts of human dignity and the common good, but which now have no concept of why they exist and find themselves in an increasingly incoherent spiral. The hard reminders in Exodus about caring for the alien, the poor, the widow and orphan, fall on deaf ears: for some, because they cannot understand what any of that could have to do with the truth of their favorite doctrine, and anyway whoever wrote that stuff sounds an awful lot like a modernist heretic; for others, because the whole theological underpinning for such morality no longer exists, and so it becomes impossible to feed the poor without extensive training in gender theory, impossible to heal the sick without a deep commitment to murdering the unborn.

Maybe the most important thing to say here is exactly what Jesus says: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God… Thou! Not that guy over there. Not “a man.” You. Commentators note in fact that the Lord adapts the quotations from the Torah in this pointed second-person singular way, perhaps as a direct call-out to the lawyer who condescendingly tries to test him. But that direct and personal phrasing of the commands reaches out from the text of the gospels to each of us. This isn’t just some nice theory about the difficult balancing of human life; it is a command for you and me to act whether or not we feel like it, whether or not we think it will work to accomplish some other end. Love God with heart, mind, and soul. John Bergsma compares these three parts to the three classic stages or aspects of the spiritual life: the purgative, by which we purify and train our passions; the illuminative, by which we discipline and form the mind; and the unitive by which we unite ourselves with God. And because, at each step, the Lord reminds us that we cannot truly love God without loving his image, these stages of forming the heart, the mind, and the soul cannot be pursued totally alone in an absolute sense. I wonder if the person devoted to active mission in the world must work harder to find solitude and know that God must be loved first for his own sake. Likewise the contemplative must work harder to face those people and external tasks which can feel like “distractions,” but which in the end force us to meet God on his own terms.

But the first goad to both loves must always be the recognition that “we love because he first loved us.” This is the hook by which the wire of divine love reaches into our hardened hearts and pulls us towards the light. There is nothing new about the command to love God and our neighbor, but when it is spoken by Love himself, in the flesh, it takes on a new aspect, because suddenly God and our neighbor are visibly united in this one man who reveals that no amount of suffering can stand in the way of his desire to bring us into his kingdom and restore us to way of life.