30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ex 22:20-26; 1 Thes 1:5c-10; Mt 22:34-40 

We are told that a scholar of the law
“tested” Jesus with a question
regarding which commandment 
in the Law of Moses
is the greatest commandment.
For some reason,
I was particularly struck 
by this element of the story,
perhaps because I happen to be 

married to a scholar of the law, 
one who routinely puts 
her law students to the test,
asking them, for example, the difference 
between a refugee and an asylee,
or what constitutes an aggravated felony
in the context of immigration law.
Testing isn’t a bad thing.
Indeed, it’s a very good thing
if, for example, you want
to make sure that your students
will not one day malpractice in court.
So maybe this scholar of the law
was simply exercising due diligence,
making sure that Jesus knew his stuff
so he would not commit 
rabbinical malpractice.

But the word in our readings
that is translated as “test,”
a form of the Greek word peirazō,
can also mean to “tempt”:
trying to trip someone up 
or catch someone out.
It is the same word that is used
when we read of Jesus being tempted 
by Satan in the wilderness
or when he teaches us in the Our Father
to pray that we be not led into temptation.
And the test in today’s Gospel reading
is one more in a series of tests 
that we have heard Matthew recount
over the past few Sundays,
tests posed by Pharisees 
and Sadducees and Herodians
who want to trip Jesus up 
or catch him out.
This test, it seems, is a trap.

But what exactly is the trap?
Perhaps this scholar presumes,
not without reason,
that Jesus is some Galilean bumpkin
whom he can lure into the dense forest
of the law of Moses,
with its 613 commandments
encrusted with years of interpretation.
Perhaps he thinks that Jesus 
will pick the wrong commandment
and show his ignorance
or become overwhelmed by the task,
lost in the forest that he cannot see
because of so many trees,
and simply give up and return 
to his Galilean backwater.

But Jesus never loses sight of the forest
even as he attends to each of the trees.
He draws a commandment 
from the book of Deuteronomy,
about loving God,
and one from the book of Leviticus,
about loving your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus is not the first Jewish teacher
to point to these two verses
as a way of summarizing the Law of Moses,
which contains laws both 
governing our relationship with God
and governing our relations with our neighbors.
But Jesus does not simply offer two verses
that remind us of the two types of commandments.
Rather, he melds them together in a way
that allows us to see, as he sees, the “shape” 
of the Law God has bequeathed to Israel: 
all of those 613 commandments 
hang together as a whole 
whose shape is love:
love of God and love of neighbor,
revealed to be one and the same love.

He knows this not because 
he is a scholar of the law
but because he is the God 
who has become our neighbor,
who in his flesh unites 
those two loves into one,
even as he unites us to himself:
“Amen. I tell you, whatever you did 
for one of these little ones, 
you did for me.”
To love Christ present in the poor,
in the hungry, in the thirsty,
in the stranger, in the imprisoned
is not simply to prove to God 
our obedience and loyalty 
by obeying God’s commands
regarding them.
It is to love God himself.

In the Law of Moses God tells the Israelites
that they should not molest or oppress
the foreigners living in their land,
because they were themselves once foreigners,
oppressed in the land of Egypt.
This remains important counsel:
don’t forget where you and your people came from,
and extend to others the same welcome shown to you.
But Jesus raises the stakes:
the love you show to the alien living in your midst
is identical to the love you show to God,
because in the mysterious alchemy of divine grace
that stranger who bears God’s image
has become Christ for you,
and to love him 

is to love God.

And so too with the widow and orphan,
or the person fallen on hard times 
who is in desperate need of money.
These “little ones” are particularly 
vulnerable to exploitation,
and the Law of Moses tells us
that God will be their advocate,
that God will be their protector
and their avenger.
This remains an important reminder:
God takes the side 
of the weak and oppressed.
But Jesus raises the stakes:
in stripping himself of his divine glory
he takes on the form of a slave,
the form of the widow,
the form of the orphan,
the form of the destitute,
and to abuse or exploit them
is to abuse and exploit him,
and to love them 
is to love him,
and to love him 
is to love God.

Scholars of the law,
as they pick their way 
through the thickets
of rules and regulations,
might be tempted to miss 
the forest for the trees,
to miss the fact 
that obedience to law 
is never an end in itself,
and that the entire point of law
is to enable us to love our neighbor
so that we might love God.
Rules and laws, of course, are important,
and Jesus is not saying that all you need is love.
But he is saying that law that is not
enfolded in love, 
drenched is mercy,
can never become a means
of leading us to God.

And even we who are not 
scholars of the law
must resist the temptation 
to focus so much on 

who has kept the rules
and who has broken the rules,
who has made good choices
and who has made bad choices,
whom we deem deserving
and whom we deem undeserving,
that we miss the human person,
the living image of God,
who is standing right in front of us
asking for our love.
Let us pray that we 
might be delivered
from this temptation 
in this time of testing,
and that God in his merciful love
might have mercy on us all.