For this command that I enjoin upon you today’ (Dt 30:11)….and what is this command? It is one simple word, a word so multi-faceted and complex, and still simple, straight-forward….something we all know from very young. We are stamped with the Divine word of love…this is the essence of God’s command, and it is the nature of God…Love embodies the totality of who God is. Jesus is the incarnate manifestation of Divine love and through him this unconditional love is now woven into our hearts and into the cells of our humanity. Every human person is stamped with love… ‘agape’ love…God’s love…we have been loved first and that love beckons us from birth to death.
We meet the Risen One in the encounter of love, an encounter that includes forgiveness, receiving a deeper, fuller truth, and a way of being that is broader than the one we are living now. The encounter is about meeting the One who ‘makes all things new’, new in seeing, new in terms of a fresh perspective on how God meets us and enters our lives, new in terms of how we see ourselves and our sister and brother.
How do we love God? We are commanded to love God with our whole heart, soul and mind? This is the first commandment. From an incarnational reality, what does this mean? Well, Jesus implicitly gives the answer when he says the “second is like it” (Mt 22:34-40). Jesus means that to love one’s neighbor as one’s self is like the first commandment…the two are intimately connected and cannot be separated. To know what Jesus means by ‘love of neighbor’ we can turn to other teachings of Jesus: we are called to love our enemies; and if struck on one cheek we are to offer the other cheek; we are not to retaliate, either by word or by hand (Mt 5:43-44, Mt 5:40). To give another example, we have the story of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (Lk 10:29-37). Jesus tells this story in response to the question he is asked: ‘Who is my neighbor’? ‘My neighbor’ in Jesus’ mind and heart is expansive, it includes everyone: my enemy, the one who thinks different or whose views are different, who acts different, the one with whom I am in most conflict with right now, and even the one who would strike me down.
Once again, we have a parable that Jesus uses to teach the word of God. The parable for this 28th Sunday is a wedding feast that a king has prepared for his son. If we were to do a scholarly review of the text, we would see that the early church used this parable by adding on its own moral precepts through inserting allegory into the parable. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this, but it can elude the underlying meaning of Jesus’ message in this particular parable. For example: the servants sent out to invite people are ‘mistreated’ and some ‘killed’. And then the king sends ‘his troops’ who go and ‘kill those murderers’. So: what happens to Jesus’ earlier teaching on ‘Love your enemies’…and ‘if you are struck on one cheek, offer your other cheek’? Remember in an earlier chapter talk I mentioned that the Jesuit scripture scholar Fr. John Donahue stated that Jesus in his parables disorients us in order to orient our minds and hearts to see as God sees. Jesus disorients human ways and he challenges the old way of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ with the radical call for love…indeed our love must extend to include our enemies.
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