Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXXI per Annum B
3 November 2024

 In the verses before today’s Gospel passage our Lord is in a series of debates with various groups of his time, and the debates are rather contentious.  Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees were debating with the Lord and they were seeking to entrap him.  The passage today picks up with a scribe, another group of people in Jesus’ time.  Scribes were biblical scholars of their day.  This scribe notices that Jesus is handling these disputes and answering the questions well.  And so, with a sincerity that the other groups could not muster, this scribe asks the Lord “Which is the first of all the commandments?”  In other words, which is the most important command in the law?

The reason this was a question and was an item of debate in Jesus’ time is due to the vastness of the Torah and its laws for how faithful Jews should live their status as God’s chosen people.  To help us understand the dilemma, consider that later scholars would enumerate some 613 laws.  That’s rather daunting, so finding out what is most important has some merit.  This is what the scribe asks.  It is a very important question.

The Lord’s answer is not surprising.  He quotes the prayer known in Hebrew as the Shema.  That title is taken from the first word of the prayer.  Shema in the Hebrew means “to hear”.  The shema is a prayer that calls Jews to listen and hear that they are to love God with all that they are and all that they have.  For a Jew, knowing the shema would be something equivalent to our knowing the words of the Lord’s Prayer from Scripture, or our knowing the Creed.  It was very familiar, a prayer used daily, and it was no surprise that the Lord highlighted it as his response for the first of all the commandments.  In fact, the words of the shema are found in the Book of Deuteronomy and we heard them in the first reading, “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.”  By naming aspects of human being, like heart, soul, and strength, we should not take that to mean a division of human life carrying with it some erroneous idea that we should love God with only part of ourselves.  Rather, the divisions of human being are actually meant to communicate a totality for they represent the deepest unique aspects of what it means to be a human being, a rational creature with powers of mind, emotion, and physical strength.

But, as the Gospel relates, the Lord did not stop by quoting the shema.  He continued his response and, this part can be said to be more surprising.  Jesus went on to say that after love of God with all that one has, there is a second command that is related to the primacy of that first of all the commands.  And the second is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  In establishing what you and I today call the Great Command (love of God and love of neighbor), the Lord was offering a synthesis of the many laws taught by the Jews.  The Lord is saying that all of them are oriented toward, and ultimately serve, the twofold command to love God first above all things, and to reflect God’s love for others by the love we have for our neighbor as ourself.

This is a lesson and a command that endures and that guides us today.  In fact, the scribe’s response to Jesus shows us still more.  The scribe notes that to observe this twofold command of love of God and love of neighbor is, he says, “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  This claim caught my attention, because the Jewish ritual system of worship is based upon animal sacrifice.  Surely, a faithful, knowledgeable, and serious Jew – as a scribe would be – was not suggesting that temple sacrifice has no value, or that temple sacrifice should be abolished.  Certainly, not.  Rather, Jesus tells the scribe that his answer is good and that he is not far from the kingdom of God, because the scribe highlights what a Jew should understand about temple sacrifice.  The type of offering described here, is not the type of sacrifice by which the person takes or eats a part of the sacrifice, as in the case of the Passover lamb.  The whole burnt offering was the type of sacrifice by which the entire animal was sacrificed and burnt on the altar.  Jesus is pleased with the scribe’s knowledge because the scribe is bringing to the forefront an important lesson for a Jew, a lesson that remains for us too.  Namely, a whole burnt offering is supposed to symbolize to the Jew that his entire life and all that he has, all his heart, all his soul, and all his strength are the actual sacrifice that should be given to God.  The whole sacrificial animal is a substitute in the sacrificial system; but, the individual person of faith must strive to give all of himself in obedience and submission to God and His commands.  In this, such a faithful person is not making empty sacrifice and is not far from the kingdom of God.  In this, the sacrifice has meaning and is pleasing to God.

This critical lesson remains for us.  It remains for us because the challenge and pitfall in the life of faith is as common among Christians as it would have been among Jews.  That challenge and pitfall is as common now as it was in the Lord’s time.  And that challenge and pitfall is the tendency to follow God superficially, to do religious things on the surface, to be religious only here in the church walls, but to keep God and our relationship with Him rather distant and focused on the external matters that can be seen.  Meanwhile, inside we are not directing all that we are and all that we have to God.  The challenge and pitfall is the tendency to permit God only a limited place in our affairs, while keeping Him conveniently out of the affairs of our life that would require more sacrifice, more effort, more conversion.  We learn that our entire being must be oriented toward God and His ways.  It is not enough to give part of oneself or to give less than all to God.  Our offerings are acceptable and valuable when they reflect what is true about ourselves: that we are submitting ourselves to God and His commands.  All of ourselves.  Every aspect of our lives.  If we do not have that interior disposition, then our religious actions and sacrifices, our participation in our worship, like the Holy Mass, would be lacking and may risk being empty.  In the Holy Mass we follow a typical pattern: we listen to God’s Word in the Scriptures because, like a scalpel, it cuts through some of the deception and the delusions that we may have if our faith is kept superficial.  We move from God’s Word to the Word Made Flesh present on our altars and offered in sacrifice for us, because in that total gift of himself, the Lord models how our sacrifice must be.  What sense would it make, in other words, to participate in this sacrifice if I reject that call to give all of myself to God and to love others as I love myself?  What sense would it make to come to receive, to take Holy Communion, the Lord’s total gift of himself, and to say “amen,” to say, I believe but then not give all of myself to the Lord in return.  We are weak and sinful in this regard, in our resolve to avoid being superficial.  And so, thanks be to God, we can repent and be healed in confession.  Charity and service to others stretches us in our tendency to be superficial.  Ultimately, like that Jewish prayer the shema, we are to hear and to listen to the truth that God loves us completely and we are most fully alive and complete when we likewise love Him in return.  May we strive then to do away with being superficial in our religious life and practice so that we may be consoled by those hopeful words of Jesus: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”