Love & Wisdom
Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)
"Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!
Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God,
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your strength.
Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today” (Dt 6:4-6).
There are many things Jesus says in the gospels that just seem like common sense. For example, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12:31). That's another way of putting the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” which is also something Jesus says (Mt 7:12; Lk 6:31). You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree with these statements. While they can be difficult in the doing of them, the principle behind them is uncontroversial.
On the other hand, there are other things said by Jesus that if anyone else said them, you'd think they were insane. “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” comes to mind. Another one is this: “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (Jn 15:14), or relatedly, when he says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15). If one of my female students came to see me and told me her boyfriend said this to her, I'd tell her to dump the bum and run as far away as possible. If your relationship with someone is predicated upon complete obedience to their will, that is a clear sign of toxicity.
If I insisted in all my relationships on always having things my way, that's not just cruel and insensitive, it's also stupid. Who is to say my way is the best way? Of course I think my way is the right way to do things, but my wife often has a different point of view, and maybe her way is better than mine — it usually is. So I'd be dumb to insist on my way all the time. Other people know things I don't, they consider things I don't, and their perspective enriches me. It allows me to look at the world in a different way and get a bigger picture of reality, because I know I’m only ever seeing a small part of that picture.
But when it comes to God, there is no “bigger picture.” There is only the one complete picture, because the mind of God is what generates reality itself. He has spoken the universe and everything in it into being by his word, and that includes you and me. He knows all things, he understands all things, down to the smallest detail. He knows how everything works and fits together. He doesn't need to consult anyone else's point of view; he sees things from every possible perspective. He alone can truly comprehend all of existence. There is nothing hidden from his wisdom.
That’s why the ancient Israelites revered the idea of divine Wisdom, and thirsted after it. They knew that if we could only obtain even a small amount of the wisdom of God, it would be of tremendous benefit: not all of it, because that would be impossible, but if we had just a part of it, the part pertaining to ourselves and how we are to relate to others, then we would be blessed. It would be like having access to the owner's manual for humanity. We would be able to live in the world much easier and to much greater effect. Knowledge of such wisdom would be a pearl of great price, worth anything if we could find it.
So it makes sense what we read in our first reading today, that Moses tells Israel to keep God's commandments so that they will have long life, and grow and prosper; so that they will be blessed (cf. Dt 6:2-3). The blessings that come from following God's commandments are not signs of favoritism God grants as a reward for following his arbitrary rules — no, they are the natural consequences that flow from living our lives according to the mind of the God who made us; just like if you follow the manufacturer's instructions for operating your computer or your car or anything else, you have a much better chance of not screwing it up. Things tend to go better if you use things in the way they are intended, and the same is true for your life. God's wisdom, as revealed in his commands for us, shows us how we are meant to live, and he gives them to us for our benefit.
And the central piece of wisdom God revealed to Israel is what they called the Shema, which is the first word in Hebrew of, “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the Lord alone” (cf. Dt 6:4-5). The LORD is God. When you read the Bible and you see the word LORD in all caps like that, it stands for the divine name in Hebrew: Yahweh, I AM. He is God. Not Baal. Not Molech. Not Zeus or Posiedon. Not the sun or the moon. And certainly not the human emperor sitting on his throne. Yahweh is the only God. You will worship your Creator and no one else, because no one else is worthy of your worship and God would spare us the great indignity of worshiping a mere created being.
This central piece of wisdom revealed by God about who he is and how we are to relate to him is the cornerstone of everything else. It became the most revered sentence in all of scripture to the Jewish people, something they taught their children to say, something they prayed morning and night (cf. Dt 6:7). Pious Jews hoped for these to be their last words before they departed from this life. That's how revered this commandment was to them.
So when the scribes ask Jesus which of all the commands of God is the greatest, as we read in today's gospel (Mk 12:28-34), they are asking a question that would be obvious to any Jew. And of course Jesus provides the correct and anticipated response with the Shema. But then he goes one step further. He highlights another piece of divine Wisdom that had been revealed to the Jewish people, underscoring the connection between the two: you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lv 19:18).
This is wisdom: that you should love God more than anything else, because nothing is more worthy of your love than God; and you should also love your neighbor, because your neighbor is made in God's image. Don’t love your neighbor — or any human being — like they are God, because they are not God, but love them as much as you love yourself because they are just as worthy of love as you are. And you should love yourself because you are also made in God's image. Jesus tells us that there are no commandments greater than these and indeed all the others are contained in these two. And in teaching us this, Christ reveals to us what lies behind the law of God, what gives the law its meaning and its force, and that is love. The God of creation is Love, which makes love the principle that all reality is based on.
God's special revelation to Israel was not that the Creator exists. The pagan philosophers knew that much. The special revelation to Israel was that the Creator was a personal God who desired to be known by his people, to be in relationship with them. “You will be my people and I will be your God” (Ex 6:7). And Christ reveals to us the nature of that relationship, which is love. It is not a relationship of slaves to their master, although He is our master. And it is not a relationship of subjects to their king, although He is our king. It is a relationship of a bride to her bridegroom. It is an intimate friendship. Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants, but friends” (Jn 15:15), and, “You are my friends if you keep my commands” (Jn 15:14).
This changes everything about how we receive God’s commandments. It changes everything about how we understand the moral teachings of the Church. God’s commands are not arbitrary rules imposed upon us by an outside force that will punish us if we don’t obey them. God’s commands are pearls of wisdom given to us from our loving Father who wants to help us live rightly; who wants to teach us how to love.
Jesus says that all the commandments are contained in the love of God and love of neighbor. You can see how this is so by looking at the Ten Commandments. The first three teach us what it means to love God. It means not worshiping false Gods. It means respecting his name. And it means making time each week to come and worship at his altar, to renew our devotion to him and to commune with him. The other commandments teach us what it means to love our neighbor. If we love our neighbor we don’t lie to him, we don’t steal from him, we don’t covet his possessions and we certainly don’t take his life. These things are antithetical to love. Love does not lie. Love does not commit adultery. Love does not break faith or rejoice in the wrongdoing of others. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous or pompous or rude. Love endures all things. Love is not selfish. It is self-giving, as Jesus gives himself for us on the cross and on the altar at every Mass (cf. 1 Cor 13:4-7).
Through his commandments, God reveals to us not just his mind, but his heart. Christ shows us the mind and heart of the Father in the most intimate way and invites us to be his friends. No other religion in the world could imagine their gods doing such a thing, because our perspective, our understanding of reality is just too small and limited. God widens our narrow perspective. That’s what love does. And God does more than expand our perspective — he blows it wide open. If we pay heed to the wisdom of God and really try to live by it, then our eyes will be open not only to the love of God but to the true meaning of the world and our unique place in it: because only when you realize that the Love that brought the universe into being is the same Love that gave its life on the cross for you, do you begin to see reality as it truly is. I think this is what C. S. Lewis must have meant when he said that he believes in Christianity in the same way that he believes in the sun: not so much because he sees it, but because by its light, he sees everything else. The revelation of God’s love in Christ changes everything. The only rational response to that revelation is to love that Love with everything you’ve got.