You Shall Love! ~ 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ex 22:20-26
Ps 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51 (2)
1 Thes 1:5c-10
Matt 22:34-40

Again, in this week's Gospel, we find the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus. The question put to Jesus is which commandment is the greatest among the 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law. Jesus is not to be trapped because he also knows the Law and without hesitation, he sums up the entire 613 commandments and the teaching of the prophets with the words:

"You shall 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 is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Matt 22:37-39)

Jesus is saying that to fulfill the Law and the prophets, one must love God with our whole being AND to love other people. All people; not simply people who are like us, but everyone. We must love because we have been created by God in the spirit of love. The kind of love that we must show is an unselfish love where we abandon our own interests so that the other person's needs become more important than our own. This is how Jesus loved. He was willing to sacrifice himself so that we could live.

As we can all recognize, an unselfish and sacrificial love is not easy for us to attain. However, as we grow in our faith and in our love of God, we can appreciate and find comfort in Paul's words to the Christians of Thessalonika when he wrote, "...you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit so that you became a model for all the believers..." (1 Thes 1:6-7)

There is power in our love of God and our love for others. It will affect how we live in relationship to others and will enable us to do everything for the glory of God.



~ "The Pharisees question Jesus" by James Tissot