30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Writing to the Christians in Thessalonica,
converts from paganism,
St. Paul commends them for having
“turned… from idols
to serve the living and true God.”
Idol worship was common in the time of Paul;
indeed, the Jewish people 
were thought to be oddballs
because the temple where they worshipped 
contained no representations of their God.
But the Jews were adamant that their God,
the living and true God, 
could not be represented 
by something made by human hands,
and that those who practiced idolatry
worshipped gods who were dead and false,
glittering products of craft and ingenuity
that could neither see nor hear,
could neither give love nor receive it.

For St. Paul, as for all Jews,
the problem with idolatry 
is not that God has no image.
Indeed, the book of Genesis tells us
that human beings are created 
in the image and likeness of God,
so images of God are all around us.
The problem with idolatry 
is that it ensnares us in the illusion
that the images of God that we create
are the true image of God,
so that we are relieved of the burden
of having to honor
the image of God that God creates,
the human images of God 
we encounter in our daily lives.

The Jewish alternative to the worship of idols
is summed up by Jesus in today’s Gospel:
the true way to worship God
is to “love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind,”
and to “love your neighbor 
as yourself.”
Love of God and love of neighbor
constitute, in their unity,
what it means to worship God.
All other acts of worship—
prayer and fasting,
ritual and sacrifice—
are nothing without these two,
because we find the true image of God,
the image not made by human hands,
in the person of our neighbor 
and in ourselves.

Of course, avoiding idolatry
is nothing so simple 
as not making physical images of God.
We can craft idolatrous images of God
with our minds as well as with our hands.
We can imagine God 
as a heavenly police officer
enforcing our rules,
or a divine therapist
salving our consciences,
or as cosmic life-coach
telling us that we can have it all.
We can imagine God 
to be a god who suits our needs,
a god who serves us
rather than the God whom we serve.
Such a god, no less than a statue of Zeus,
is an image fashioned by human beings,
and to set up such a god
in place of the living and true God
is no less an act of idolatry.
Indeed, for most of us
it is a much more common, 
much more tempting, 
form of idolatry.

But even if we banish 
these false images of God 
from our minds,
this is not enough to avoid idolatry.
We must not only avoid honoring false images;
we must also properly honor the true image.

We honor the true and living 
image of God in ourselves
when we give up on the idea that we are self-made:
that our accomplishments are somehow our own,
that we owe nothing to anyone,
perhaps not even to God.
This is a false image of ourselves,
for a true image is one that always reflects
and is dependent on that of which it is an image.
No less than the human-made idols in a temple,
the image of ourselves as self-made 
is an image that is lifeless and false,
a glittering product of human craft and ingenuity
that can neither give nor receive love.
To know myself as an image of God
is to know my true worth and dignity,
it is to know my own existence as a gift
that I neither earn nor deserve.

We honor the true and living 
image of God in our neighbor
when we see that they too exist as divine gifts:
gifts to themselves and gifts to us.
Among the first laws that God gives to the Israelites
after they have been freed from captivity in Egypt
are laws protecting widows and orphans
and foreigners living among them.
These, whom scripture describes 
as the “little ones,”
are groups uniquely vulnerable:
foreigners have no tribe to protect them,
widows have no husbands,
orphans no father.
Each of them is subject 
to abuse and exploitation,
to being used by the powerful
to enrich their coffers
or indulge their appetites.
Even if not actively exploited,
they are all too easily 
overlooked and abandoned
by those who ought to come to their aid.
But God does not overlook them;
he says to the Israelites,
“If ever you wrong them 
and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.”

Perhaps the problem is that we presume 
that the image of God
is to be found only 
in the great and powerful—
in those self-made people
who have clawed their way 
to the top of the heap—
and not in those 
weak and vulnerable ones 
who lie crushed 
and shattered in their wake.
But this too is idolatry,
for it fails to see that the image
of the true and living God, 
is to be found in these little ones 
above all others.
For God has shown their image 
to be his image
by taking vulnerable flesh 
and dying on a cross,
abused by the powerful
and abandoned by his friends,
abandoned by all but his Father,
who heard his cry and raised him to new life.

God calls us today to turn away from idols:
the idol of a god who suits my needs,
the idol of myself as self-made,
the idol of my needy neighbor 
as one whom I am free 
to exploit or overlook.
God calls us to turn 
to the true and living God,
to love that God with all of our 
heart, soul, and mind
and to love our neighbor as ourself.
May this God—
living, true, and merciful—
have mercy on us all.

 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading: Exodus 22:20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
These, Jesus says, are the two great commandments.
It sounds pretty simple.
Of course, anyone who has tried to love
either God or neighbor, 
much less both,
quickly discovers that this 
is a fairly complicated affair.

How do we love God,
when God can seem so distant and mysterious,
so difficult to know?
Who is the neighbor that I am supposed to love?
Is it anybody and everybody?
Does it include my enemies?
Is it okay to love some more than others?
Does love mean accepting people as they are
or does it mean working to help them be better?
And how exactly do these two things—
love of God and love of neighbor—
relate to each other?
Can I do one without the other?
What if my love of God 
seems to come into conflict 
with my love of neighbor?
Which has priority?

We might continue to multiply questions,
but at some point the questions must end
and we have to get about the business of loving.
After all, love of God and neighbor is presented by Jesus
not as a helpful hint but as a command,
and our questions can become a kind of evasion.
There are many things we can come to understand
by stepping back and pondering them,
but we can only discover what love means 
by stepping in and actually doing it.
But how do we go about stepping in
to loving God and neighbor?

The best way to step in to loving God 
is by praying.
Because God is perfect, 
God needs nothing from us;
but, because God is good, 
God desires that we give him ourselves.
God wants us without needing us,
precisely so that we can flourish
and be united to God in eternity.
And the way we give ourselves to God
is by giving God our time, 
for time is the fabric
from which our lives are fashioned.
To step in to loving God,
offer God your time in prayer.
Offer it without worrying too much 
about whether you’re doing it right.
Just ask for what you want
and give thanks for what brings you joy;
God will let you know whether or not 
you’re wanting or enjoying the right thing.

My son the musician tells me 
that bad practice is infinitely better 
than no practice at all.
It’s the same with prayer:
flawed prayer,
distracted prayer,
misdirected prayer,
angry prayer,
bored prayer,
rote prayer—
it’s all better than no prayer.
For in our flawed prayer
God comes to help us,
and God’s Spirit prays within us
with sighs too deep for words.

What about loving our neighbor?
How we step in to loving our neighbor 
is as varied as the neighbors we love.
Our reading today from the book of Exodus
calls our attention to those neighbors 
most in need of our love,
but whom we might be inclined 
to step back from.
The foreigner living in our land,
the widow and orphan who have no protector,
the person in need who is subject to exploitation,
all those whom we can easily overlook.
We tend to think of the word “love”
as finding its natural home 
in our circle of family and friends.
But the law of love calls us 
to cast a wider net.
Indeed, the way to step in 
to loving our neighbor
often involves us stepping out
of our immediate circle.
And this means seeking justice 
for those most in need,
those most fragile and vulnerable,
those most unprotected and friendless,
no matter who they are.
As the philosopher Cornel West puts it,
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Concern for the needy stranger
in whom Christ himself is present
is the standard by which we will be judged.

Of course, the love we show our neighbor
through the pursuit of justice
can be as flawed and frustrating
as our attempts to love God through prayer.
I think we Catholics can feel this 
particularly during election season
as we confront what is, 
in light of the standard
set by the Church’s social teaching,
an array of less-than-perfect choices.
Even more frustrating is the fact
that the needs and the interests 
of those crying out for justice—
the widow and the orphan,
the alien and the poor neighbor—
might not seem always to align 
and the justice we can achieve
is only a rough approximation
of the justice God calls us to.
But just as flawed prayer 
is better than no prayer,
our stumbling pursuit of justice
is better than injustice.
We do what we can,
trusting that God’s Spirit 
will work in us and through us.

We cannot let the imperfection 
of our love of God and neighbor
become an excuse for stepping back
from the love that Christ commands.
The Spirit calls us to step in
and be not afraid.
Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind;
love your neighbor as yourself.
Trust in the Spirit to aid you in your weakness
and to bring to completion
the good work begun in you.
And may God have mercy on us all.