• 31st Ordinary (B), November 5, 2006
• Theme: Who is My Neighbor?

• In today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark, Jesus recounts the Two Great Commandments to the faithful Jewish Scribe.
• These commandments relate to what we heard in the first reading from Deuteronomy.

• The First Great Commandment is , “You shall love the Lord your God with ALL your heart and with ALL your soul and with ALL your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:5 – the Shema)
• But even here there is a catch:
• The tiny work “ALL” might be the greatest challenge of the First Great Commandment.
• All means everything - giving all that we are and have to God.
• All means every part of me, holding nothing back, nothing left out.
• If I lived in a monastery on a hilltop overlooking both the sea and the mountains, I actually might be able to live out this requirement quite well, at least in a quite general way.
• It is much easier to love God on a hilltop than it is to extend my love of God to the specific way of loving other human beings.
• Yet, God dwells in each of us.
• So, the “ALL” of the first great commandment must include each one of them and myself.
• It is the people who are foreigners, who speak a different language or who are down-right nasty who make the word “ALL” such a challenge.
• It is much more difficult to include Uncle “Idiot”, or Ms. Pain-in-the-Neck” than it is to sit in meditation on the Love of God without any of “those” people around.
• Nevertheless – if I am to live the First Great Commandment, then we realize implicitly that I simply must love everyone who bears the imprint of God within them.
• It is exactly this connection that Jesus points out explicitly to the Scribe in the Gospel reading.

• In the time of Jesus, the rabbis could count 613 commandments of the Torah. Of these, 248 were positive in form and 365 negative.
• The religious teachers debated which were the “heavy” commandments and which were “light.”
• So, in religious circles a point of discussion would be: which of these commandments was “first” or most important.
• Hence the setting for the question the scribe asks Jesus.

• In his response Jesus quotes two commands from the Hebrew Scriptures and, in so doing he explicitly says that no one commandment can adequately answer the scribe’s question.
• By putting the two together Jesus also suggests that the two constitute one great commandment.
• For him, love of God and neighbor are not “first” and “second”—they constitute one commandment greater than all the others.

• Here in Hollywood, I will often hear the following from people:
• “I don’t belong to any particular faith, but I am a Spiritual Person”
• In other words, I believe in God, but don’t bother me about anyone else or any community of believers.
• God is personal to me along
• Fine – but it is not Christianity – Catholic or any other denomination.

• Jesus’ challenge is that if we say we love God, then the way we show it is to love our neighbor.
• In the context of the Old Testament, there is a narrow sense of who the “neighbor” is;
• It would be family members or if would be those belonging to the “Chosen People”.
• In Jesus’ teachings, especially in the parable of the Good Samaritan (cf. Luke’s Gospel), he extends the sense of “neighbor” beyond any ethnic or religious confines.

• Two Examples of the challenge of today’s readings:
• 50th Anniversary of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps
• Young people, many of whom come from narrowly focused, privileged backgrounds
• Spend a year working with inner-city agencies – a challenge
• Spend a year living in community with a small group of well motivated, yet unknown young adults – a challenge.
• Finding out concretely what it means to live out the Great Commandment.
• Practically speaking today – Both in Europe and in the United States, especially in California, we are challenged by the Great Commandment, to examine our attitudes towards Immigrants.
• In our dealings with them
• In the way we employ them and pay them
• In the way we deal with legislation about them.

• Let us continue with our Liturgy
• Praising God for God’s presence among us and in each of us
• Asking the Spirit of God to continue to lead us to respond to the Challenge that Jesus presents to us in the Gospel

• Amen

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