First reading (Ex 22:20-26) explained: Since Jesus, in today’s Gospel, sums up the Law of God in a formula of loving God and loving others, the passage chosen from Exodus prepares us for this message. This passage is part of a long narrative, Exodus, chapters 19-24, in which the Hebrews, liberated from Egypt, are in the desert of Sinai. God announces His desire to enter a Covenant with the people. Moses is the mediator. God manifests Himself in terrifying thunder, lightning and clouds. God gives the terms of the Covenant in various paragraphs, on several occasions. The people assent to the terms. These include the familiar Ten Commandments, the paragraphs that elaborate the commandments in great detail, ritual prescriptions and much more. This is the context of today’s first reading which is taken from a section of Exodus dealing with the laws of social conduct, especially the social ethic based, not on justice, but on a compassion like God’s, resulting from the love they are to have for their underprivileged fellow-human beings. The Law of Moses civilized the Jews, instilling in them the idea that it was wrong to oppress an alien or take advantage of the poor, things they themselves had suffered, because their God cared for widows and orphans and wanted them to do the same. The result was that the ancient Jews began to build an excellent, humane society rooted in the basic religious concept that loving God necessarily involves loving one’s neighbor.
The second reading (I Thes 1:5c-10) explained: First Thessalonians is the earliest letter we have from Saint Paul. The first century AD Thessalonians lived and served in a mostly pagan city with an enthusiasm so contagious as to attract others to the Church. Here Paul congratulates his audience on the positive effects of their example of loving one another as Jesus has commanded them to do. They have received the Gospel with ready Faith, he tells them, and they have withstood persecution with joy. Those actions, particularly their loving response to Paul himself, their ready belief in Jesus, and their generous living out of that Faith, have bolstered the Faith of Christians elsewhere who have heard about them. Paul and these earliest Christians believed that Jesus would come again very soon. Their conviction was that God was soon to bring history to its end with the return of Jesus in glory. [This expectation faded over the years during which the New Testament Scriptures were composed].
Gospel exegesis: The context: A Pharisee, who believed in both the written Law and the oral tradition, seeing how Jesus had defeated the Sadducee who had tried to humiliate Him with the hypothetical case of a woman who married seven husbands, asked Jesus to summarize the most important of the Mosaic Laws in one sentence. This was a challenge because, in the Judaism of Jesus’ day, there was a double tendency to expand the Mosaic Law into hundreds of rules and regulations and to condense the 613 precepts of the Torah into a single sentence or few sentences. (The Pharisees identified 613 commandments in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Two hundred forty-eight were positive (“thou shalt”) and three hundred sixty-five were negative (“thou shalt not”). Summarizing the Law, King David proposed eleven (Ps 15), Isaiah six (33:15), Micah three (6:8), and Amos only one (5:4)). Jesus’ answer teaches us that the most important commandment is to love God in loving others and to love others in loving God. In other words, we are to love God and express it by loving our neighbor because God lives in him or her. Some Bible scholars think that it was a trap question because the Pharisees believed that each one of the 613 commands in the Torah were equally important and necessary to obey. Therefore, they were trying to corner Jesus into showing either ignorance about the Law, or disrespect for parts of it by choosing one command over the others.
Catechism on the greatest commandment (CCC #2083 & #2196): Love of God means putting Him first, respecting His Name, and keeping His Day [the Sabbath; Sunday for us] holy. To love God means a dedication of the entire person to His will, placing Him first in one’s mind and the heart, speaking respectfully about Him, and keeping His Day as one of prayer and true recreation, a day to keep His Law. Love of God transforms lives every waking moment of every day.
Love of neighbor means respect for others, their relationships, their reputations, and their property. Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 indicate love in action. Loving our neighbor as ourselves means looking at and treating others with the respect God gives them. This love begins at home with one’s parents. It then extends to others. Love of neighbor extends beyond our family and friends to strangers, especially to the poor, the sick, and the sinner. Love of neighbor knows no national borders or class distinctions or barriers of any kind, because God knows no such impediments.
To love our neighbor: Jesus underlines the principle that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves because both of us bear God’s image, and to honor God’s image is to honor Him. The love of God has priority and is our source of love for neighbor. In our neighbor we see something of God, His creature, His image and likeness, and His adopted child. So, if we love God, we must also love His image, the work of His hands. God makes daily contact with us through the people around us. Love for our neighbor is a matter, not of feelings, but of deeds by which we share with others the unmerited love that God lavishes on us. This is the love for neighbor that God commands in His law. Since the Jews considered only their fellow-Jews as neighbors, Jesus, challenged, used the parable of the Good Samaritan, as reported in Luke’s Gospel, to show them what God means by “neighbor.”
Life messages: 1) We need to love God: Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength as our response to His Love for us means that we should place God’s will ahead of ours, seek the Lord’s will in all things, and make it paramount in our lives. There are several means by which we can express our love for God and our gratitude to Him for His blessings, acknowledging our total dependence on Him. We must keep God’s commandments, and offer daily prayers of thanksgiving, praise and petition. We also need to read and meditate on His word in the Bible and accept His invitation to join Him in the Mass and other liturgical functions when we can.
2) We need to love our neighbor: God’s will is that we should love everyone, seeing Him in our neighbor. Since every human being is the child of God and the dwelling place of the Spirit of God, we are actually giving expression to our love of God by loving our neighbor as Jesus loves him or her. This means we need to help, support, encourage, forgive, and pray for everyone without discrimination based on color, race, gender, age, wealth, personal attractiveness, or social status. Forgiveness, too, is vital. We love others by refusing to hold a grudge for a wrong done to us. Even a rebuke can be an act of love, if it is done with the right heart. We also express love through encouragement and by helping each other to grow. We express agápe love by meeting a need that God has given us the power to meet, by comforting each other, by teaching each other and by sharing the Gospel, in deeds and in words. We express our love for our neighbor by waiting upon the aged, nursing the sick, patching up quarrels, and listening to the broken-hearted. In short, loving our neighbor is feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, meeting the basic needs of the poor, helping the unemployed, educating the young and taking care of the old.
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