Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

THIRTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME “A”

2008

In today’s Gospel passage one of the Pharisees, a lawyer, asks Jesus a question “to test him”. “Teacher”, he says, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” To ask such a question of Jesus might be construed as an insult, because every good Jew from childhood knew the correct answer to that question. It is as if someone asked the Pope: “do you know how to say the “Our Father?” Despite the bad intentions of the Pharisee, Jesus is unperturbed by the questioning lawyer and He answers him saying: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment” Then Jesus adds that “a second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

The first and most important duty we all have is to love God, first and foremost, to give ourselves, our lives, our possessions, over to God unconditionally and completely. We are to show our love for God as a sign of our appreciation of His love for us We see this same question asked in the Gospel of Luke, but there it was Jesus Who asked it of the lawyer who came to Him and the lawyer, in Luke’s account, answered Jesus correctly. However, in the Gospel of Luke the lawyer asks Jesus another question, saying: “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus replies by telling His beautiful parable about the Good Samaritan. In general the Samaritans were looked down upon by the Jews, but in Jesus’ parable, He makes the Samaritan the hero of His parable. He is the one who comes to the aid of the man left beaten and dying on the side of a road. By this parable, Jesus wants to teach us that anyone who is in need of any kind should be the object of our love, that we are all called to be good neighbours, and to help anyone we are capable of helping. First of all, though, we are called to love God. God must have the first place in our hearts, even before ourselves..

A prominent evangelist once answered the charge that “God is dead” by declaring: “I know God is alive, because I spoke with Him this morning.” When we have true faith in God we know that He is alive, for we have experienced God’s Presence in our lives in one way or another. Nonetheless, the words of the prophet Isaiah are also true when he says: “Truly You are a God who hides Himself.” Sometimes God reveals Himself to us clearly, but at other times He may reveal Himself to us in rather strange and unexpected ways. For example, consider what happened in the following story about a young girl who goes to see the tragic play “Endgame” by Samuel Beckett. In that play, the various characters are rattling on about the miseries of life, and they play cruel tricks on each other just to get their minds off their inner pain. It’s all very depressing. Once following a performance of “Endgame”, a certain psychiatrist told the director of the play that he had brought one of his patients to see it. She was a sixteen year old girl who had attempted suicide three times. “But why to this play” the director asked. “Why to such a hopeless statement as this for a girl who is already wallowing in fear and depression?” The doctor pointed out that, on the contrary, this play opened up entirely new channels of hope for his patient. “Through it” he said, “ she had come to realize that there were other persons who totally identified with her. It was obvious to her that the author of the play knew how she felt at that time, and this was worth months of therapy. She began to see that her problems were shared by others, and she virtually danced out of the theater that night. Had I taken her to a bouncy musical she would have been completely turned off. I have to work with her where she is,.” he said.

God deals with us where we are, and there are times when we may not be in a good place. We may be spiritually down, or mentally depressed, incapable of prayer. At those times, we may want to pray, we may want to hang on to our faith, but we have many doubts and many questions we just cannot answer. Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, came into this world precisely to remind us that God knows us perfectly well, and that God loves us perfectly where we are. At all times, God knows how we feel and, through Jesus, He will pick us up, like the Good Samaritan, and heals us in His time. Many of the greatest saints and prophets experienced severe spiritual trials and dryness in their lives. As can happen with us, they sometimes felt lost and even abandoned, even though they knew down deep that God never abandons anyone who is in need.. The book of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible gives us a good example of a man who was very religious, pleasing to God, but who was greatly tested in his faith. The more Job reflected on the problem of human suffering, the more the presence of God seemed hidden from him. Job said: “Should He come near to me, I see Him not; should He pass by, I am not aware of Him. Where then is my hope?” (Job 17:15) Then we could look at the prophet Jeremiah who in his book in the Bible gives us a vivid account of his crisis of faith. Jeremiah was a prophet chosen by God and he told God’s people many things they did not want to hear, but which they needed to hear. At the hands of his fellow Jews, Jeremiah suffered much persecution and he must have wondered when was God going to intervene and come to his aid. Jeremiah wrote: “I let myself be duped............ The word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach.......... Cursed be the day on which I was born.”(Jer. 20:14) The best example of a holy man who felt seeming abandonment by God was, of course, Jesus Himself. As He suffered and was dying on the Cross, Jesus prayed this psalms from the Old Testament which says:: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” Certainly, it is no sin to wonder where God is, or to feel spiritually empty, or even at times to be disappointed or even angry with God. These kinds of feelings are normal human feelings in times of crises. Feelings are neither good nor bad in themselves. Sin occurs as a result of the decisions we make, although our feelings may affect our decision-making process. What is sinful would be our decision to give up on God, to ignore God, or to abandon Him, and to quit trying to live good lives. Yes, there are times when we feel that God is hidden from us, and not interested in us, when we feel spiritual dryness, but in those times of pain and suffering, God is near for He will not abandon us ever, especially when we need Him most. Some wise person wrote the following lines to express this important truth: “I said to Love, ‘Thy law is much too hard,. I cannot follow Thee’. Love stretched forth mighty arms and said, “Come child, I’ll carry thee.” Perhaps you have seen the picture of the two sets of footprints in the sand which soon become only one set of footprints. When God was asked how come you left me to walk alone through life, He answered: “I did not leave you, My child. When difficult times came along, I carried you.”

In the first reading today we heard God tell us how we can love Him by loving one another. God said: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; you shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you....you shall not exact interest from them. If you take your neighbour’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down.” Jesus teaches us that we can love God only if we also love our neighbour. If our concern for our brothers and sisters is shallow or weak, so too is our love for God.. I recall when I was in the seminary, our professor of Sacred Scripture had us memorize Paul’s great treatise on love which we find in his first letter to the Corinthians.

Paul wrote: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love hears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1Cor. 13:1-8) It is a passage of Sacred Scripture which we ought often to read and recall that, in truth, Love never ends, because God is the Source of all true love and there is no limit to God’s love. Let us ask our loving Father to fill our hearts with His love and to expand our hearts that we may receive even more. The great spiritual writer, Thomas a Kempis once wrote: “A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover, as the love of the giver.”