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 Matthew.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Glory to you, O Lord.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking, teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?
He said to him, 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.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, Jesus had poked the bear a few too many times.
He was consistently going after the powerful and the influential to try to get across to them that the way God is honored and loved is the way God's grace and mercy are shared freely with one another and the ruling people.
The elites had started to get to a point in their lives where they felt that everything they did was right and that they deserved everything they had.
They were poor stewards.
And here, at the beginning of this gospel, as we are told, the Pharisees had seen that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees. They saw this as an opportunity to come after him a little bit.
Ah, we're going to catch him now.
So they throw this question out, hoping he's going to say something that is just slightly off of what they believe, so that they could in turn, not just dismiss him, but hopefully get him arrested.
And here Jesus gives them an answer that was deeply rooted in their scriptures and that was deeply rooted in their tradition.
Unfortunately for them, they had stopped listening to their own tradition a little bit.
In fact, I would even argue a lot.
So the first part of the answer was ideal for them.
Love God with all your being.
They would have agreed with that.
How they lived that out, however, was less than ideal.
But it's that second part he throws at them that would have drove them crazy.
Not because it was anything they could catch him at, but because once again, he was poking the bear. He was reminding them that the way they do the first half requires what they do in the second half. If you're going to love God, the way you show it is by loving your neighbor well. That truth, that reality, is a good one for the whole Christian church to hear once again to recognize that the way we honor and love God is very much, in fact forever tied to the way we love our neighbor.
And here's what is good for us to ask ourselves once in a while.
That age old question, who is my neighbor?
And we can find some hints to it in the other aspects that Jesus taught the story of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan was the outsider, was the one that could easily be dismissed. And Jesus holds them up as a neighbor.
The suffering and the afflicted that Jesus is always talking about caring for, they're our neighbor.
And for us today to fully answer that question, we have to ask ourselves individually, who is that individual? Who is that person? Who is that category of people that I find easiest to dismiss, to ignore, to forget about?
And we all probably have a little bit of a separate answer to that.
Well, whoever that is, for us, that's our neighbor. It is easy for me to stand here in front of all of you and say, seeing you as my neighbor, I love you. At least most of you. There might be one or two. That's a little difficult for that's easy.
But think of people that you fundamentally disagree with on virtually everything.
It could be in your politics.
It could be in the way you see the world.
It could be people of a different culture or a different religion or a different race.
It could even be, and this is the hardest one for us to swallow in today's world.
They could even be Packer fans.
And guess what?
Those are the people we're called upon to love.
Now, I say this not on my high horse because I find it as difficult as and challenging as any one of you do. In fact, maybe even more challenging.
But here's how we do it.
We do it by recognizing on our own it is 100% guaranteed impossible.
But doing it united to Christ and allowing him to make us strong where we are weak, as St. Paul reminds us of just recently.
It is in looking to him that those things that seemingly are impossible become much more possible. In fact, become possible.
