Homily for the Week of October 23, 2011

Homily 30th Sunday A 2011

Exodus 22: 20-26; Psalm 18; 1 Thes 1:5-10; Matthew 22:34-40

We have a short Gospel today, but the ideas it contains are enormous. Numerous books and discussions have been written about each of its ideas: love for God and love for others. Our English language uses only the one word love for a variety of emotions, attitudes, expressions and activities. Very often we confuse love with liking or affection. Affection is mostly a feeling between two persons, but we can love most everyone if we put our mind to it. Liking or affection is primarily a feeling; love is primarily a decision and action.

By the time of Jesus, the Jewish Law included 613 actions that we should do or should not do. So it would have been appropriate for a lawyer to ask Jesus which one of these 613 laws is the most important. And that is what the Pharisee did. But the Pharisee was not really interested in knowing which was the most important law, but he wanted to trick Jesus. According to the Jewish religion all laws were equally important because they believed that all laws were from God; therefore, all were important. To pick one law over another was not to be done.

Jesus could have answered the question by giving a long discussion of Jewish laws, But Jesus did not answer that question directly. Instead Jesus goes to the Jewish Bible which all Jews would have known very well. He quotes the Jewish book of Deuteronomy: You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Jesus went on to add another law which was written in the Jewish book of Leviticus: You shall love your neighbor as yourself'. Jesus links the love of God and the love of neighbor. They are different aspects of the same reality and can never be separated. They form what is known as the Golden Rule: Do to others what you want them to do to you.

Our first reading today from the book of Exodus gives Jesus an example of love for widows and orphans. Widows and orphans were abused in Jewish society. A woman’s status and rights were initially based on her connection to her father. A father literally “gave” his daughter to her husband; her status and rights were then based on who her husband was. When she became a widow after the death of her husband, a woman’s status came from her attachment to a son, But if she had no children she had to beg. An orphan was a child who had no legal male guardian. Those children also had to beg for survival. Every right and all benefits were based on kinship. The laws from Exodus in today’s reading existed to protect the widow, the orphan.

The law also dictated that those suffering financial burdens were to be helped, To charge interest was a terrible sin. God is a God of compassion, and the Israelites were expected to live in His image. Compassion was a sign of the love for others.

God's law was compassionate, and it demanded that the defenseless be cared for. Much of Jesus' life was spent reaching out to those whom society had forgotten. He sought out the ''widows and orphans'' in order to show them that God did love them.

Our ability to feel compassion and to act on it is one of the criteria that God will use when we are judge at the time of our death. Those who take advantage of the vulnerable, or even those who might not do harm but do no good because they lack compassion, will endure the wrath of God! These are strong words of warning.

Today everyone is hungering for love, since we are born to love and to be loved. Love is an act of our will. We either decide to love or we decide not to love. It is not just a matte of feeling, or soap opera or movie kind of love, nor is it infatuation with a boyfriend or girlfriend or sexual attraction.

Mature love for God and for others has to be measured more by what we are giving than what we are getting. Warm feelings are nice, but they are not the criteria of love for God and for others. Loving God means obeying God and giving some time for prayer and also some time for worship as you are doing right now. Loving our neighbor means helping them in whatever way we can. That is why the Bible refers to love as a commandment, because we don’t always feel like praying or keeping the commandments. We don’t always feel like helping our neighbor.

Love is living the right way in relationship to God, to others and to ourselves. And that is where love gets difficult. A person who loves God as he or she loves others and self really has not need of any other commandment or laws. We practice that law of love of God by thanking God for what he has given

Today, on World Mission Sunday. As baptized Catholics, we have a responsibility to love those around us through our daily kindness, honesty and patience. We also have the crucial task of spreading the Good News of God’s mercy to people who urgently need His saving word. Like helping Sister Ella in Sri Lanka who takes care of 20 girls who were abandoned by their family and some by a tsunami.