(Exodus 22:20-26; 1 Thessalonians 5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40)
Dear People of God, Our Lord Jesus, out of
sublime love for, and obedience to, His Father in Heaven, came to live as a man
on this earth in order to serve and save us from the eternal consequences of
our sins.
Why do our earthly sins incur heavenly
consequences? Because God made us in His own image and likeness. All God’s creation He pronounced ‘good’, but we human beings were meant to be
His supreme delight in creation, destined for a home in heaven as His
truly-adopted children, through our faith in Jesus of Nazareth, the
only-begotten Son-of-God, sent by His
Father to become man, by birth from Mary the Virgin of Nazareth and the sublime
Gift of the divine Spirit of Holiness.
From the beginning of Israel Moses had been
unique by reason of his love for and commitment to the God Yahweh Who saved Israel – His ‘Chosen People’ -- from
physical slavery in Egypt. Yahweh, the only
true God and Lord of all creation, wanted
to save His people from all forms of slavery, above all from the spiritual
slavery to sin that would make them spawn of Satan and deprive them of that
likeness to God which was the very basis of their intended being. Moses received from Yahweh a unique Law,
which he, as first and greatest of Israel’s subsequent prophets, proclaimed to Yahweh’s
Chosen People: a law embodying national love for and obedience to their saving
God, along with mutual respect and care between all members of God’s People, a
Law quite unique in the world of those times.
Moses thus in his own person exemplified and manifested both the Law and
the Prophets.
Subsequently, further Prophets were sent
by God who repeatedly reminded Israel
about Yahweh’s concern that sincere mutual respect for and service of their fellows
should grow ever more among His Chosen People rather than an ever-greater
multitude of unasked-for and ostentatious individual sacrificial offerings in
His Temple.
The Law and the Temple authorities on the one
hand, and the God-sent Prophets on the other, thus gradually came to be more and more at
loggerheads in Israel until Jesus,
the second and greater Moses, was sent by His Father to make all things one in
His own unique human being and divine Self: the beloved and only-begotten Son
of His Father in heaven, and our own flesh-and-blood brother and Saviour.
Our Gospel reading told us that in the
course of His public ministry in Israel Jesus said:
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 neighbour as yourself.
Now, that first and greater commandment cannot
be fulfilled without obeying the second; because love of the God-Who-loves-humankind
necessarily involves our loving the humanity we encounter daily, that
is, our neighbour. And here, Jesus’ fundamental words concerning
Christian marriage are totally relevant and supremely important here:
What God has joined together let not man separate.
For that, dear People of God is precisely what modern godlessness
is trying to do!!
God, first of all by creating man in His own image
and likeness, joined man to
Himself, in his very essential being; and that is why modern godlessness – I
mean the deliberately intended denial and hatred of the very idea of any God –
can only and ultimately fail or destroy humanity … and in our days we are regularly seeing and hearing of such a gradual
destruction of the glory of God’s creation in and among our fellow beings.
Denying God, of course, means that the true understanding of ‘love’ is
lost in the whirlpool of life being lived simply for the experience of living itself
– no ultimate purpose involved – just living as best you will and for what want so long as no ‘criminal’ acts are committed.
How ambitious, dear Brothers and Sisters in
Christ, is the devil’s project to divide
what the very Person of Jesus so gloriously manifested, and what His Holy
Spirit so graciously and powerfully supports and furthers, as vocationally and potentially
one!
Who are the devil’s instruments? All those do-gooders of today who remember
something of the beauty of Jesus’ once-loved teaching while refusing to follow
His example of obedience to His Father, their God. They will practice a
love towards men which makes themselves feel good, but not a love of God that
calls for their obedience!! And how
can they do this? Because their ‘doing
good’ makes them feel independent of God! They feel no need to give glory and obedience
to God once they have embarked on the good ship ‘Good will to all men’. The ‘do-gooders’ of whom I am now speaking
are not fools, they are not necessarily insincere or hypocritical; some of them
truly love being able to do good to others in need; but from a Catholic and
Christian point of view they are foolish in thinking that they can separate
what God has joined together, by their attempt to practice authentic ‘goodness’
without themselves being obedient to the God Who alone is Good.
Such ‘do-gooders’ deny that they themselves
are subject to the slavery of sin: their good works, they would say, show their
goodness!! They themselves should know
that that is not logical thinking, nor is it factually true in so many cases!
Jim’ll-fix-it … a popular man’s public name in
Margaret Thatcher’s time … did very much good indeed, but his self-confidence involved
self-indulgence of the grossest kind. That grossness reflected not so much his common
humanity as his own distinct personality, for any and every unredeemed
man or woman who rejoices in the goodness they do as being a work of their own
goodness, is already a slave of the devil, is already being prepared by him
to do whatever work he may want of him …
not necessarily something so gross as in the case of Jim’ll-fix-it, but
something ultimately very indicative of the deepest human and angelic sin, that
of pride: I have no need of God,
least of all to do good to fellows of my choice!
Let us look back to Jesus’ own experience (Matthew
26:6–12):
Now when Jesus was in Bethany in the
house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to Him with an alabaster jar of
costly perfumed oil, and poured it on His head while He was reclining at
table. When the disciples saw this, they
were indignant and said, “Why this waste? It could have been sold for much, and the
money given to the poor.” Since Jesus
knew this, He said to them, “Why do you make trouble for the woman? She has
done a good thing for Me. The poor you
will always have with you; but you will not always have Me. In pouring this perfumed oil upon My body,
she did it to prepare Me for burial.
St. John (12: 4-5) gives some more particular
and pertinent details of the one whom we may consider as the prototype of
‘do-gooders’:
Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’
disciples, and the one who would betray Him, said, ‘Why was this oil not sold
for three hundred day’s wages and given to the poor?
Our Church is much divided today, People of
God, and that is due, I believe, largely to the fact that Jesus is not
being preached and proclaimed sufficiently today, to the fact that His own
standard-setting words are not being followed:
You shall
love the Lord your God with all 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 neighbour as yourself.
Mother Church’s proclamation is no longer
centred on the greatest and first commandment but rather on synodal, social,
sexual, relations and difficulties which are being emotionally ‘stirred up’ to
such an extent that they are disturbing her centre of gravity and ultimate
identity which will be, and should now be:
You shall love the Lord your God with
all heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
One of the great and burgeoning, so to speak, evils of our day is suicide in both
young and old. In the deepest depths of
the human personality there was, is, something missing for such people, and
that is the Personal presence of the acknowledged God of Love Who
created us originally in His Own
likeness and for Himself eternally.
And Jesus is the God-given link, bond between that lonesomeness
which is ours of ourselves, and the blessedness of Divinity which is His from
‘the beginning before the world was made’;
Jesus the only-begotten and most beloved Son of the Father, and at
the same time our Self-sacrificing Saviour, Lord, and Brother; Jesus
the Link and our Lord, Jesus our supreme Pontiff!
Dear People of God, we are weak and ignorant
human beings: Adam and Eve were once monstrously deceived by the devil showing
himself as an angel of light; and that is why Jesus speaks to us today in and
through His Church using words that are of crystal clarity:
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 neighbour as yourself.
