A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
(Matthew 22:34-40)
Fr. Pine’s Sunday Homily for Exodus Men
Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew gets us to the very heart of the matter.
Our Lord is tested by a lawyer, specifically in matters of legal interpretation. He is a member of the party of the Pharisees, in comparison to the party of the Sadducees. The Jewish people had diverse traditions of legal interpretation, and there was a growing focus on the law. When the Jews talk about the law, they’re thinking especially of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers. Within those five books, certain passages focus especially on legal codes. We have the Covenant Code in Exodus, the Levitical or Priestly Code in Leviticus, and the Deuteronomic Code in Deuteronomy. Especially in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, we have the giving of many laws, specifically 613 in number. I’ve mentioned this before in other contexts, but 613 is the sum total of 365 and 248. It’s understood that 365 is the number of days in a year, and 248 is, according to the Hebrew understanding, the number of parts of the body. In other words, this is a comprehensive law. It appeals to the whole man throughout his life.
These laws, generically speaking, concern moral things, ceremonial things, and judicial things. The moral things are the Ten Commandments, for instance, or certain instances of moral precepts. The ceremonial precepts govern the offering of worship—how man comports himself vis-à-vis God. This would detail how one offers sacrifice in the temple. The judicial precepts govern man’s comportment vis-à-vis his fellow man. This would detail what happens if one guy kills another guy’s oxen, for instance. Do you kill two of his or three of his, give back one, or what do you do? The idea here is that one needs to derive further precepts from the most generic precepts of the natural law so that one can specify them for this or that situation.
Again, we’re referring to the Old Testament law, or the Mosaic law. Yet we know this law has been fulfilled, or completed, with the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who gives us a new law and a new commandment. It’s not just 613 things he’s giving us. He’s giving us himself, which is beyond any of those precepts. When he sends the Spirit to the depths of our souls, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.” He fills us not just with prescriptions or mandates, but with the very wherewithal to be in relationship with him, to abide in a relationship such that we never fall afoul of the law because, obviously, it’s not about that. It’s about being with him.
In the Old Testament, we have laws that delimit the bounds of relationship. In the New Testament, we have a law that gives the very substance of that relationship. Obviously, there are still precepts and commandments that help us delimit those bounds. But the emphasis isn’t so much on those that identify wrongdoing. The emphasis is on the relationship itself.
In today’s passage, Our Lord sources his fulfillment of the law in the Old Testament. He quotes from two Old Testament precepts: “love God with your whole mind, heart, soul, and strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” And he draws for us the connection between the one and the other. Basically, it’s in loving God that we’re able to love our neighbor. The social justice warrior will say, “Well, I can love my neighbor without loving God.” The point that Our Lord is making here is that the only thing that really matters is loving God, and the only thing with which we can bless each other is the love of God. We can do a couple of cool, natural things. St. Thomas Aquinas will say we can plant vines and build roads. But we can’t do anything of truly lasting worth. We can’t do the things that matter most, the things that lead to salvation, the things that actually secure for us heavenly life. In order to have that, we need to be in union, in communion with God, and be able to conduct each other into that same union, into that same communion. The only thing that does that is charity. Charity alone abides.
Faith is great—it approaches God as truthful, and it gives us access to his revelation. But faith will pass away in heaven because we’ll have vision there. Hope is also great. Hope approaches God as helpful. It gives us access to his promises. It says they apply to us because he’s omnipotent and merciful. But again, hope is going to pass away because there’s no need for hope in heaven when you have possession. Charity alone abides among the theological virtues because charity is the virtue of union or communion. Charity is what gets us to God. It shows up at God’s doorstep so that it can enjoy his company, his friendship. And the fact is that we can have that friendship because God has given us access to it. He has based that friendship on the very divine beatitude, his enjoyment of divine life, so that we can become sharers or participants in the same. This gives us what we need in order to love him and to love each other because he’s given us his very love, and that’s the only love sufficient. It’s the only love sufficient to fulfill our human nature as destined for communion, as destined for a sharing of thought and affection, and to be as God intends us to be.
This topic dovetails nicely with the theme of holy speech, because what’s the point of speech? It’s to concretize our affection, to concretize our thoughts so that we can share with each other in the body. And the fact of the matter is that we have the very thing that makes it possible to achieve a deep level of sharing because God has poured his love into our hearts. He’s given us this new law, the law of the Spirit, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father,” whereby we actually live out the sonship to which he has invited us.
Let’s thank him for this gift.
