October 25th 2020. The Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

October 25th 2020. The Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

GOSPEL: Matthew 22, 34-40

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini broadcast on Vatican Radio

 

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Don Fabio’s homily follows the Gospel

 

GOSPEL: Matthew 22, 34-40

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees they got together and,

to disconcert him, one of them put a question,

‘Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?’ 

Jesus said, ‘You must 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 resembles it:

You must love your neighbour as yourself.

On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

 

Summary . . .  In the Gospel, Jesus proclaims the shema, so central to the orthodox faith of every devout Jew, the commandment to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind. Then he tells us that a second commandment “resembles” the first: you must love your neighbour as yourself. What does Jesus mean by “resembles”? Is he pointing out some kind of structural similarity? No, what Jesus is saying is that this second commandment belongs irreplaceably with the first. To obey one commandment implies obeying the other. If I “love” God and forget my neighbour, then my love is false. If I “love” my neighbour and ignore God, then my love is false. Authentic love requires both the “vertical” and “horizontal” elements. Sometimes in the Church we find people who focus on the relationship with God to the exclusion of the people around them. Often, they are preoccupied with precise liturgical norms and rubrics. But the relationship with God is deficient if it is not translated into the tenderness of fraternal love. On the other hand, if I am devoted to fraternal love and charity without reference to the invisible, then my “love” will also be deficient. To the extent that my “love” is founded purely on human considerations, then that love will be as small as we are ourselves! Love needs to be open to the greatness of that which transcends us. Christ banished the darkness of this world by showing the love of God for us from the cross. I need to be open to the love of God in order to love my brothers and sisters in the right way. I must love my brothers and sisters in order to love God genuinely. These two commandments are inseparably united in the person of Jesus. In him, the relationship with God became a relationship with our brothers and sisters. As Jesus says in the last line, on this love for God and neighbour everything depends. If the things we do are not done out of love, what sense have they? This great Gospel puts all the secondary and trivial things in perspective. Nothing matters but love for God and neighbour.  

At the end of our lives, the only question we will ask is: Did I love?

The question from Sunday’s Gospel: “What is the greatest commandment?" What is the most important thing to do? What is it that decides everything? It is not so difficult to answer: when events prompt us to look at our lives - and this can happen for a thousand reasons – the first question we ask ourselves is if we have loved others genuinely, if anyone is happy because of us. Often, when a priest hears the last confession or the last worry of a dying person, there is only one real question: did I love? Have I been a good father, a good mother, did I leave anything good to those around me?

The devil tries to distract us from the priority of love. He does not need to make us do evil to achieve his purpose. It is enough to distract us and make us fixated with secondary, empty, things.

Jesus is right: loving God and loving one's neighbour is all that matters. Everything depends on this. This insight can illuminate the futility of a thousand secondary things. We are constantly distracted from this priority by the work of the evil one. He does not need to make us do evil. It is enough for him to distract us from doing good. He keeps us engaged in secondary things, gets us caught up with activities that are not bad in themselves, but which simply are not love. Outside of love there is no happiness, but only substitutes for happiness.

Scripture tells me to love my neighbour as myself. Does this mean that my first priority must be to love myself?

Yet, there is more to love than the popular viewpoint realizes. In reality, everyone talks about love, everyone sings about it, everyone writes about it. But we have to examine what they are talking about, because the world is full of chatter about false, transitory and ambiguous love. In fact, it is not true to say that “love” brings “happiness”. What is true is that only real love brings real happiness. In recent decades, much preaching has focused on the phrase of Jesus, taken in turn from the Book of Leviticus: "You must love your neighbour as yourself". Sometimes the conclusions drawn from this phrase have been appropriate, but at other times a simplistic equation has been made of the sort: the Lord tells us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and therefore if one does not love himself he ends up not loving others either; conclusion: you must first learn to love yourself! 

The problem with focussing on loving yourself is that it is impossible using your own strengths. Only the knowledge that we are loved Christ can free us of self-doubt or self-hatred.

Fifty years ago it was urgent to underline this point, because we had to free ourselves from an image of love dominant at that time which only spoke of impersonal obligation. However, this led to further problems: to love yourself, to accept yourself, is not just difficult, it's impossible! The fact is that I need to be loved if I am not to despise myself. It is only when I am loved that I escape the trap of thinking that there is something wrong with me. Only Christ can lead me to look upon myself without horror, without that sense of insufficiency that I carry inside. 

The solution is not to focus on love of self, but to see that our true centre is outside of ourselves, in communion with Christ and others.

There is a mystery here! I must love my neighbour as myself, but if the first obligation becomes to love oneself, then I can become so focussed on myself that I forget the neighbour entirely! The task of that sentence is to get us out of the vortex of self-destructive narcissism. Narcissus, in Greek mythology, was the one who dies in the well of his own image because he does not listen to the nymph Echo who calls him to look at her and love her, and this is today's problem: obsession with ourselves. Christ leads us to our true centre, which is love, but this centre is outside of us, it is in relationship, in communion, in unity. Because it is precisely when I am with God and with others that I discover myself. Nowadays there is a big emphasis on teaching children to look for self-fulfilment, but what we really need to teach them is to look beyond themselves and be with others.