Depend on These Two
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered
together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You
shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and
with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second
is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the
prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:34-40)
Piety
The Catholic Worker believes
in creating a new society
within the shell of the old
with the philosophy of the new,
which is not a new philosophy
but a very old philosophy,
a philosophy so old
that it looks like new.
(“Easy Essay” by Peter Maurin, co-founder of The Catholic Worker
Movement)
Study
According to some sources, Hebrew
Law had 613 mitzvot (commandments). This
was a complex “legal” framework that the Pharisees and Sadducees were monitoring
and imposing on the people.
Ah, but God likes creating new things and shaking up the status quo. Sometimes those things are brand, spanking
new. See Genesis. Sometimes those new things are made out of
something else entirely and changed. See
the water blush in the presence of its creator during the wedding reception at
Cana and turn into wine. Sometimes,
those things are renewed from the shell of the old inside the body of something
new.
The two commandments Jesus gives in Matthews Good News are really not
new per se. The first commandment is rooted in the Hebrew Bible:
Hear, O Israel! The
LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God,
with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.
(Deuteronomy 6:4-5)
Neither is the second commandment new.
It too takes root in the Hebrew Bible:
“Take no revenge and
cherish no grudge against your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:18)
However, Jesus elevates these two above all the others with his
teaching that they are first and second to none. He takes something old and makes it new. This
threatens the status quo that the Pharisees were protecting.
A new Jerusalem is coming. Get ready for “a philosophy so old that it
looks like new,” as Peter Maurin wrote in the Easy Essays which are neither
easy nor in essay form (free verse poetry). This, when Jesus proclaims the
Nazareth Manifesto in the temple, we feel the full force of that new creation
possible when the Spirit of the Lord is put in us.
“The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the
blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the
Lord.” Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them,
“Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)
Action
Dare I remind you that one of the first lessons we older Catholics memorized
in the Baltimore Catechism? Technically,
it was question 6. The answer we recall foreshadowed the Cursillo tripod
we would learn much later in life:
Q: Why did God make me?
A: God made me to know Him
(study), to love Him (piety), and to serve Him in this world (action), and to
be happy with Him forever in heaven.”
God was so committed to this path that God sent his only son to do
exactly that. Mary was the perfect disciple. However, the Pharisees
were the exact opposite of perfect disciples and this brought down the woes of
the world on their own shoulders. Jesus existed to show us the way through the
narrow gate. The Pharisees instead, tried to block us and others.
“Nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.”
What kind of disciples are we?
What do we depend upon?
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