30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 22:20-26 | 1 Thessalonians 1:5C-10 | Matthew 22:34-40

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, hope and charity, and make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

If you remember last Sunday’s homily, it was a story of the Sadducees, who were considered to be the most influential and the most important of those who cared for the temple. They didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, and so they had a dialogue with Jesus, and Jesus was somehow able, with his wisdom and knowledge, to basically expose their error. And so he corrected the Sadducees, saying that God had used terms, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” proof that there was such a thing as life after death, something the Sadducees didn’t believe in. Pharisees did, so maybe the Pharisees felt, “Wow, he’s on our side.” And so they came to him with a really sincere question. I don’t think they were trying to trip him up like the Sadducees did, but they just asked — and this was a question that was very common to the Pharisees, because the Pharisees were more engaged in interpreting the law, interpreting scripture. And so basically, they come and ask Jesus, with a sincere heart, “What is the heart of the law?” Because that’s what people had asked them over and over again. “What is the heart of the law? For 600 rules, can you boil it down to something more easy to grasp?” And the answer that was given in the past, but the answer Jesus gives, is all about love. That’s the heart of all these commandments, treating each other with love, understanding that love is your nature, and the thing that brings you the greatest joy and the greatest happiness is following your nature, living as you were created to be. We are made in the image and likeness of God. It’s a beautiful, beautiful image, and so it seems they were pleased. But Jesus also added something that I’m not sure was ever added before, but he also said, “When you say love God, I’m asking you to be a lover, not just to love God, but you have to love your neighbor, and you have to love yourself.” So it’s not something you do. It’s something you are. If you’re a lover, you love everything. If you say you’re a lover and you love these things and hate those things, you’re really not a lover.

So Jesus is setting the stage to say, “This is the heart of my message. This is what I want to say to you, and my Father was not able to say it to you in the Old Testament.” This is really fascinating. Why not? Well, listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, and basically it’s stating the way God dealt with the people of the Old Testament. And they were much lower in terms of their level of consciousness as to who they were. They were more, I would say, rooted in more their animal instincts. So the biggest thing about the people in the Old Testament at the time was that they were concerned very much with self-survival. They needed to get what they needed, and they needed to mate so they would continue their race. But it was all basically self-centered stuff, and when you’re dealing with self-centered people, what’s the best motive you can give them for doing something that would be more helpful to the people around you? That is a threat to say, “If you don’t do what I’m asking you, I’ll kill you. I’ll take your — I’ll go against your most basic instinct.” When you hear that phrase in the scripture, it just pops out, because the God of the Old Testament is not different than the God of the New Testament, but the God of the Old Testament had a different audience, and he had to say things to them that they would understand. And so when he says to them, “If you mistreat each other, I’ll kill you. I’ll just come with a sword and chop your head off, because I’m compassionate.” Wait a minute. Who is he compassionate to? The one that’s abused. How does he feel about the abuser? Kill him. Now, what is that supposed to mean? Is God mean? Is God vengeful in the Old Testament, and then he has a big awakening in the New Testament? No, he’s working with his audience as they would understand, and one of the things he’s basically saying to them, which is much deeper and much more powerful — the people in the Old Testament, caught up in their self-centeredness, had no idea how interconnected they were with everyone else around them. What the wisdom behind that statement is: if you hurt someone else, you’ve hurt yourself. If you kill someone else, you kill something in yourself. It’s a wonderful, wonderful wisdom that eventually is revealed in Jesus, and it’s this connection that we all have.

So what changed the audience? Why, when Jesus came, were there some people who could really accept him? That was because there was a slow growth of consciousness in the Old Testament. There was experience after experience that led them to say, “I wonder why this isn’t working, because every time I go to kill someone, they come back and kill me.” They grew up a little bit, to say the least, and so finally, when Jesus comes, he is basically the law incarnate. He is the truth. So Jesus does his teaching not by explaining it so much but by being someone. He was a lover, and he had anger and resentment to those who were not — especially if they were in a place of authority, they were not teaching anything in the direction that the Old Testament had in seed form, but they didn’t let it grow. They didn’t let it evolve, and they were still locked into a justice system where condemnation was going to be the best motive of fear, creative motive of fear to control people. They were controlling people. They weren’t awakening people to their true essence. So how did it happen? What happened? Well, it’s called redemption. We could talk about how loaded the image of Jesus on the cross is, but there’s something in it and — well, we’ve talked about that at other times. We’ll talk about it again. There was something in that very act that awakened something in human beings about their nature that they realized is surrendering to something that they don’t understand, and loving those that hurt us is the key to any kind of spiritual growth and change. It’s the key to peace. It’s the key to being able to live in community. So we see this so beautifully producing a change in people when they see it and they understand it.

So listen to Paul to the Thessalonians, because he’s saying the same thing. He’s saying — let me say he would say to them if he was going to amplify it. Jesus came into the world, and he was the word made flesh. He was love. He was not there to tell you how to act. He was witnessing what it’s like to live as he lives, and he has such a powerful, unbelievable, effective effect on people. His very being healed people and changed people and changed their mind and their understanding. So Paul in Thessalonians is saying the same thing to the people of Thessalonia. They’re saying, “Look, you’ve been the model, just like Jesus, and it’s so beautiful to see it working, because people are changed because of who you are, not because of what you’re teaching.” The early church was not a case of everybody signing up for classes. It was a case of people watching people take care of each other in a way that was absolutely foreign to their understanding of what human beings are for and what they’re really made for and how they really are designed to work. Think of it. When you live out your life as God intended it, doesn’t that make sense that it’s going to work, and you’re going to find peace? But when you’re living it out of an illusion, let’s say, of separation and isolation and the idea that it’s all about me, and the more I can take and get from people, the better, you can see how that is going to lead to a life of emptiness, frustration, depression, fear, shame, anger. It’s all there in a world where you’re forcing yourself to be something you’re not. And what a difference when you realize, “I am — I am love. That’s what I’m made of. That’s what I’m made for. That’s my nature, and if I can just trust in God awakening that in me and allow that to work, I can become a witness to the world that’s going to change the world.” That’s what he’s saying.

It’s funny. We have this tradition in our church about the first sin, Adam’s sin and how we, when you — but that isn’t understood correctly, and it’s very misleading as it is. Even Pope Benedict XVI wrote a beautiful article about the dangers of misunderstanding that teaching, because it almost implies that God created evil people, and when tested, they showed up they were all evil. We’re not evil. We’re not damaged by our humanity. Our humanity is a gift, and we’re going to integrate that into our humanity, and the two are made for each other. And the misunderstanding of sin and the sinful nature is that that’s who we really are, so the only way to control that is by fear, by making people do it out of the same place they’re in when they choose to hurt somebody, self-centeredness. It’s playing up our self-centeredness. That’s who we were made to be. That’s the danger of the original sin. It’s like we came into the world selfish. No, we didn’t. We came into the world with a heart ready to grow into love. We still are born as infants into a family where we’re meant to love, and if we learn from the family love is the essence, we’re going to have this amazing capacity to evolve. But if you grow up in a family, like most of us did, like I did, it was always based on obedience, reward and punishment. That was in 1940, and I don't know if it’s changed a whole lot in most families, but I believe it has. I believe people now are much more sensitive to how you raise children and how important it is that they feel that they are loved and that they’re valuable and that they have dignity and worth. And whenever you see a system that just denies that and works with power and control, then you know you’re not in a place where people are going to flourish. You’re in a place that’s going to draw them back into a dark place, a place of less consciousness, less awareness of who they are.

So it’s a beautiful message in this set of readings, I believe, and to summarize it, it means that we are born, by nature, to be like our God. And God said, “I am here to help you evolve into that. And you can’t do it on your own. So when you think about all the things you’re guilty of and all the things you’ve done wrong, I’m going to wipe all that away. It’s called redemption. I’m going to die on a cross so all your sins are forgiven.” Now, having your sins forgiven is something we don’t really believe is as complete and total as God is saying, but what he’s really saying, not so much that you’re off the hook completely and that you don’t have to pay for anything you’ve done. No, what he’s saying is, “No matter what you’ve done, I only respond to you by loving you. That’s all. That’s all I ever do.” If you do that to your brothers and sisters, if when anybody does something wrong to you, you just love them more, believe that this is not who they really are, trust in a goodness that’s in them, if you love it, it will be awakened, that’s the genius of Christianity. And it’s so simple, and it’s so basic, and it can be done by anybody. And it’s not tied to one religion. It’s everywhere. it’s the truth. So I pray that — the world today especially needs to understand this compassion that God has placed in all of our hearts, and the idea that we follow rules and laws that abuse and use people or hurt them and we think that that’s good for some other reason, like it helps the economy, helps me in my job, or it helps them, but if it’s using people, if it’s abusing people, it’s wrong. And it’ll never bring peace.

So this timely, timely message is look for people who love. Look for people who have respect for one another. Look for people who have this capacity to be more like the God that created them, and then celebrate that unity that we all have and feel one with each other as we witness and live this truth. And I know the world will be changed. I know things will be different. I know that whatever separates and isolates us — and certainly we have a disease that is reminding us that there’s something in us that, if we’re not careful with it, it’s infectious, and it can hurt, and it can pull us down, and it can rob us of energy. Our senses go down. It’s all there. Pay attention. Enter into what’s happening. Learn from it, because it’s the teacher. And it’s always teaching the same thing that Jesus longed for — love.

Father, your gift is our heart, the part of us that is made for love and understanding and compassion and communion, union, oneness, surrender to what is, learning, growing.You put your heart in our hearts.Help us to be connected to that great source so that we know that the work you ask us to do is not based on our power but on your power in us.We can love like you love.It’s our inheritance, so bless us with an awareness of its effectiveness — loves effectiveness and the power you give us to do it.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.