Thirtieth Sunday Scripture Readings This nation—the United States of America—is a faithless nation. Some people insist that this country was founded as a Christian nation and therefore must be a Christian nation. Both the premise and the conclusion are untrue. The principles of John Locke on which this country was founded were both deistic and humanistic, recognizing a vague God of nature who endowed creatures with natural rights; however, from the beginning, recognition of those so-called rights was applied unevenly. From the outset, some people were considered “more human” than others. Our current situation here is that recognition of the rights to life, liberty, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, safety, and due process is now optional. This isn’t an aberration, but the natural result of the exceptions built into our legal, social, and economic systems. Any system in which basic humanity is an optional value has no basis in faith at all. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus does much more than summarize the Torah in two commandments. In fact, his opponents challenge him to choose which one of the six hundred thirteen commandments of the Torah is the greatest. Jesus’s answer, an approach unusual among scholars of the time, presents to them a single commandment with two sides: love of God and love of fellow humans. He presents these two sides not as shorthand for the other commands of the Torah, but as two pegs on which all the other commands hang. The Greek word used to convey Jesus’s meaning is κρέμαται (krematai), which means “depend” only in the sense of to hang from. Picture a suspension bridge hanging from two towers. If either tower falls, the bridge collapses. All righteousness and all human respect hang from our love of God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, translated into and demonstrated by love of others as ourselves. In his response to the Pharisees, Jesus begins by quoting a verse from the Shema—the credal statement that observant Jews recited morning and night—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one… You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” And almost in the same breath, Jesus quotes the Book of Leviticus [19:18] from the Torah itself, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is phrased not as an order but as a statement of what will be true of you. Sixteen verses later, the passage identifies who it’s talking about: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” These passages from Leviticus are a restatement of the earlier text from the Book of Exodus that we read as today’s first reading. We need to pay attention to that text because, in it, “neighbor” is far from just a vague generality. It’s quite specific. It lists people who have neither power nor advocate: immigrants, widows and orphans, the poor, and the homeless. About twenty-six hundred years ago, a field hand near the Mediterranean coast had his cloak taken from him after a day’s harvesting. He dictated a letter to the district governor asking for it back, offering the other harvesters as witnesses. That broken piece of pottery was dug up in 1960 and sits in a museum in Jerusalem. What strikes us about it is what’s missing: he never cites the law. He doesn’t quote Exodus; he assumes the governor already knows. A man facing a night in the open without his covering took it for granted that God’s law on the subject was common knowledge. He had a governor to write to. Most in his position had no one. That’s precisely the gap the Torah addresses. God doesn’t offer these people—his anawim, his little ones—legal remedies in court; instead, God promises to step in personally as their defender. Putting up a block of stone in the public square or posters in classrooms listing the “Ten Commandments” doesn’t make this a faithful, let alone Christian, nation. To do that while using the power and authority of the state to attack the defenseless and deprive the downtrodden of a social safety net is blasphemy. It completely ignores that neglecting our neighbor—our fellow human—is in itself a failure to love God and an affront to God’s holiness. And furthermore, when either part of loving God or loving one’s neighbor is ignored, all the other stipulations of God’s law collapse; all the ritual, all the God talk, all religious posturing become but senseless theater. Jesus’s unique approach to the commandments of the Torah presented the union of God’s love with love for one another as a single commandment, but the stipulations on both sides didn’t originate with him. Between them, they’re at the root of all human faiths. What Jesus showed us was that neglecting one of them was neglecting both, and, as our current regime has proven, without fidelity to God and one another, the whole moral basis of our social structures collapses. Let’s pray that people of faith will have the courage to stand up like the prophets of old and, by their example, call our populace back to the law of love: a love of God that’s inseparable from the love of one another. Readings & Homily Video Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
