Word to the Wise
Sunday, October 23, 2011 - 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - A
[Exod 22:20-26; 1 Thess 1:5c-10; Matt 22:34-40,]You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan....[Exodus] 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 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. [Matthew]
I once had a cartoon from the comic strip, PEANUTS, which quotes the character, Linus (Lucy's little brother), saying: "I love humanity. It's people I hate!" Those words come to me as I ponder the implications of Jesus' response to the Pharisees' question about the greatest of all the commandments of the law. We must bear in mind that the "law" contained 613 precepts! How could one "prioritize" one's response to so many? Jesus responds with the two commandments of love! In the Gospel of Luke, the story doesn't stop there. The "scholar of the law" then asks, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus' response to that question is the parable of the Good Samaritan! [Luke 10:29-37].
Jesus leaves us very little "wiggle room." The greatest commandments of the law do not permit love to be an abstraction. Our neighbor may indeed include the "alien" - that strange word we use for immigrants. To the Samaritan, the robbers' victim was an "alien" and vice versa. But the victim was also "neighbor." Exodus is blunt in reminding the Israelites (and us) that they were once "aliens" in Egypt. The widow and the orphan were considered the most vulnerable people in the society of Jesus' time because they would have no one to care for them.
The gospel and Exodus invite us to ponder whether or not we have allowed ourselves to become like the statement from Linus. Have we allowed "love of God" to become separated from "love of neighbor?" Has "neighbor" become an abstraction that excludes flesh and blood "people?" Can our country, which has prided itself on its Judaeo-Christian heritage, examine its conscience about national policy toward "aliens" and toward the most vulnerable people in our society: the poor, the widow, the orphan? Or have we, in the name of personal or national security, turned our backs on these "neighbors?" We cannot claim to love God and, at the same time, show hatred or insensitivity to our neighbor. Nor can we claim that Jesus failed to explain what he means by this love. Just ask the robbers' victim. AMEN