31st Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2018

Today’s Gospel incident is the one positive interaction Jesus has with the Jerusalem authorities during his last week in the city before his arrest and crucifixion. The scribe asked Jesus what was the first of all the commandments in the Jewish Scriptures. Apart from the well-known Ten Commandments, there were over seven hundred other commandments – a lot, but not as many as in the Church’s Code of Canon Law.

Jesus quoted the commandment which he himself would almost certainly have recited to himself that very day on getting up, and which every good Jew would do similarly every morning: “Listen Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”. Most of us would nod our heads in agreement without thinking about it twice. And then, without being asked, Jesus added a second commandment from the Jewish Scriptures: “You must love your neighbor as yourself”. And again we nod our heads in agreement.

But should we nod our heads so quickly? Do we take seriously the first word Jesus quoted: “Listen”? The commandment speaks about love, an extraordinarily deep love, a love that engages all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength. It speaks of a relationship – a relationship that does not just happen, but needs to be worked at constantly, deliberately. What does it feel like to love God like that? Can we feel it? What shape does it take? How do we know we love?

And the second commandment – is it just another commandment? or is it related in some way to the first? Is it, indeed, the way we can tell that we are succeeding with the first?

This commandment, too, is talking about love, not about just any relationship, but about loving – loving our neighbour, loving ourselves, indeed loving our neighbour as we love our selves. If we take Jesus as our model, loving our neighbour seems also to involve forgiving - not just sometimes, selectively, but seventy-times seven; but it also includes much more than forgiving.

And what does loving ourselves involve, for that matter? How seriously do we take that? I find myself consistently criticising myself. It seems to be my default reaction. Loving myself…? – not just being soft on myself, looking after “no.1”. That is anything but love, and can be highly destructive of my true self.

Which do I find easiest – to love God? myself? my neighbour? I am not sure of this, but I think, in my experience, it all starts with truly allowing God to love me, to love me as God loves himself. I think it is that experience, or at least that faith conviction, that gives me the energy, the inspiration, the freedom, not simply to thank God in return, or quietly to praise God, but to want really to love God. And that love slowly grows over time. In turn, that shyly unfolding love I have for God enables to see God more, as it were, from inside. I wonder if God then begins to let me love with him, somehow.

The more I open in love to God, the more I begin to understand God’s love as totally unconditional. It is the only way that God could love me. As I slowly get the hang of that, I begin also, with God, to love myself unconditionally. And as I come slowly to terms with that, I recognize that I am becoming more and more able to love others similarly, that is, as I love myself. I hope the process continues – because it is great; but I also realise that, in one sense, it doesn’t matter. God will love me no less if I don’t – because God does love unconditionally. It is the only way God does love, the only way God can love.