31st Sunday Ordinary Time (B)

 

Love God with all your Heart, Soul, Mind and Strength
 

Dt. 6:2-6/ Ps  18 / Heb. 7:23-28/ Mk 12:28b-34
   
  Introduction
         When I was in my grader, my classmates used to advice me to put my notebooks under my pillow every night before going to bed. They said that by placing them under my head for the whole night, our lessons can easily transfer to my mind, thus memorizing them faster, ready for the exam the next day. I did it once, but alas! I did not only forget all our lessons, I even forgot all my notebooks hidden under my pillow.

        In today’s Gospel, Jesus quoted the Shema, which states: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. . .”  They have to memorize it by heart because it serves as the real “creed of Judaism.” They usually write it into a small paper and place it in the phylacteries, the little leather boxes which the devout Jew wore on his forehead and on his wrist. They attach it into their foreheads, to show that they put it into their “minds.” (This reminds me of my grader experience, ha!)

  
   
  Background
  1.

The Scribe threw a very interesting question to Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” He was thinking of all the regulations in the Old Testament which were consisted of 613 distinct commandments, 248 positive and 365 negative. They were not so easy to be remembered by an ordinary Jew, so he thought of finding only one law, the greatest of all.

 
     
  2.

He got the answer when Jesus quoted the Shema (from Dt 6:2-6/ our First Reading). It is the declaration that God is the only God, the very foundation of Jewish monotheism. It was very important sentence because all the services in the synagogue always began and still begins with it. It was also being placed in a little cylindrical box called the Mezuzah which was and still is affixed to the door of every Jewish house and the door of every room in it, to remind the Jew of God in his going out and his coming in.

  
     
  3.

The second part “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” was taken from Lev 19:18. Jesus did one thing with it. In its original context it applies only to their fellow Jew. It would not have included the Gentile, whom it was quite permissible to hate. But Jesus quoted it without qualification and without limiting boundaries.

  
       
  Reflections  
  1. Jesus put these two commandments together, which no one would ever dare to do before. When Jesus quoted two laws from two distinct sources, we might be tempted to ask Jesus whether there was only one law or are there two laws? There is actually only one because you can not truly love God if you do not love your neighbor, and you cannot properly love your neighbor if you do not love God.”  
       
  2. As people spend a lot of money and energy in preparing for the coming Christmas holidays we should ask ourselves whether we do “our spiritual preparations” as well. We do this by acknowledging that is only God (the Lord alone) and stop making food, shopping and parties as the “little gods” in our life.  Above all the many concerns for this coming Christmas may Jesus remain the center of all our celebrations.  
       
  3. Christ did not only put two quotations into one law, he even emphasized that once these laws were united, it should stay united forever.  Roger Schultz, who founded the ecumenical Taize Community in France, once said: “Never Christ without men, nor these without Christ.” Without Christ who is the “way” to men, we can not fathom the dignity of the human person. Without the human person, neither can we fathom the mystery of Christ, the Word-made-flesh.”

We must remember that Jesus did not dismiss all the laws of the Old Testament. He did not say that they were useless, but he did maintain that they were all summed up in the one commandment of love. He took an old law and filled it with a new meaning.		  
     
  Conclusion  
 

According to the legend when St. John was a very old man, he consistently preached only one message: “Love God; love your neighbor.” When some of his disciples, somewhat in frustration, asked him why he persisted in the same message of love, he replied, “Because if we follow it, that will be sufficient.”