Reflection for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time A / Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost A / Reformation
Readings: Exodus 22: 21-27 (RM in Canada) or 20-26 (RM in the U.S.) or Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18 (RCL); Psalm 18 (RM) or 1 (RCL); 1 Thessalonians 1: 5c-10 (RM) or 2: 1-8 (RCL); Matthew 22: 34-40 (RM) or 34-46 (RCL).
For Reformation Sunday: Jeremiah 31: 31-34; Psalm 46; Romans 3: 19-28; John 8: 31-36.
If you grew up with popular music playing on the radio, or as recorded music or live performances, you heard a great deal from an early age about, yes, love. You heard about how passionate, delightful and tender love could be, and on the other hand, how heartbreakingly painful and utterly devastating a lost or rejected love might leave you. And yet you might, you could, manage to love again.
It’s so easy to rhapsodize about love. Except when it isn’t.
Our readings for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, hit us hard, right at the start, with an uncompromising demand that flies straight in the face of the encroaching shape of the political and social order in our day.
“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien…”
In the Gospel, Jesus extends the commandment from the Torah, “Love God with all your heart…,” to “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
And suddenly we’re not talking about exhilarating emotional love. This is about when welcoming the stranger could prove not only unpopular but very dangerous. There are places right now where protecting the alien has cost people their lives.
New Testament Greek has several words that translate into English as “love,” and the two most common NT words for love are agape and philia. Basically these describe ethical relationships, ways of respecting others and behaving toward others. These concepts of love operate apart from one’s subjective feelings of the moment, because higher values are in play. Emotions as such are not the driving force, but rather, spiritual values such as wisdom, insight, and seeing others as God sees them, as well as we can. Practicing love for others represents an ethical norm that at best becomes habitual. And God knows, we can’t always be sure we’re getting it right.
For instance, how does one love God? Scripture gives us abundant examples of God’s love for us, but few that really show us in a practical way how to love the infinitely transcendent and immanent God. Jesus cites Deuteronomy 6:5, the Shema, the most significant prayer in Jewish scripture, not a regulation, and not instructions on how to do it. The prayer is the instruction.
His questioner, the Pharisee legal scholar, would have recognized it immediately: to love God with all one’s heart, soul and strength. (Matthew has Jesus substituting “mind” for strength.) The conscious living, and loving, relationship of an individual, as part of a people, with God, would make perfect sense in the Jewish context of the covenant relationship. “Loving God” might sound emotional but in this context it had more to do with intention and faithfulness to the covenant.
But Jesus goes on to cite Leviticus 19:18,
“…you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.”
This connection comes from an earlier text, the Testament of Issachar 5:2, part of Hebrew wisdom literature.
But Jesus does something remarkable with this linking of two separate verses. He sets up a new moral framework. The law itself is now dependent on love.
Anglican commentator Reginald Fuller writes,
“Jesus understands them in a new and radical way. Without love of neighbour, love of God becomes a barren emotion. Without love of God, love of neighbour is a refined form of self-love.”
Contrary to the recent declaration of a U.S. RC bishop, empathy is not opposed to love. It’s love on its way to a higher level. Love that stands on the streets in protest. Love that maintains shelters and food banks and tries to resettle refugees. Love that bends its head down against the harsh wind of xenophobia, and stands opposed to hatred of migrants who seek a better life and a reason to hope. Love that will do anything to protect children and give them a brighter future.
What do you think?
© Susan K. Roll
*Revised from the Reflection of October 29, 2023. Which in some ways seems like a different world.
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
