Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark. Glory to you, Lord. One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, which is the first of all the commandments?
Jesus replied, the first is, hear, O Israel. The Lord our God is Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
The second is, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these.
The scribes said to him, well said, teacher. You are right in saying he is one and there is no other than He. And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
And when Jesus saw that, he answered with understanding. He said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.
And no one dared ask him any more questions. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Even a casual read of the Gospels can show us something that's pretty interesting.
Jesus rarely talked about what we should believe and spent most of his time telling us what we ought to do.
You can think of the stories he told of the Good Samaritan, the Last Judgment in Matthew's gospel, how it's important to love one another, talking about him remaining in us and us remaining in him.
It was all about relationship.
Yet it didn't take the early church long, just a matter really of weeks before the Christian church started to focus much more on right belief, what we should believe and how we should believe.
And I think, at least at times, that's missing the mark. That's not to say that those things we believe aren't critical, but it's also at least a little bit, in my opinion, arrogant. To think that we can describe God in enough detail to fully understand it is always going to be bigger than we are.
But we should look at what Jesus asked us to do, and it was 100% based on receiving a perfect love from God and then offering that love back to one another. And here we have someone who was clearly a good scholar of the faith coming to Jesus and saying, what's the greatest commandment? Now we don't know for sure. He might have been trying to catch Jesus in some kind of a mistake, which would have been foolish on his part. Or he may have actually come and asked this question in a legitimate way, looking for understanding.
But what's the greatest commandment?
And Jesus comes out in a very clear way and says, we got to love God with absolutely everything about us.
But then he says, but you gotta live it out.
And this is how you live it out, by loving your neighbor as yourself.
And I can't help but wonder in my tiny little mind how much more important it is to God that I love my neighbor as myself than it is whether I am perfect in my belief, whether I am orthodox.
I don't think God cares as much about that now. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll pay for it someday, but I don't think so. I think God cares much more about how I live out my faith and what I do with it. How I recognize that I've already been given something without merit, that is God's perfect love.
And the only thing expected of me is that I shared freely with others.
