30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ex 22:21-27
Second Reading: 1 Thes 1:5c-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 22:34-40

This Sunday, we hear a lawyer ask Jesus which of the commandments is the greatest. Jesus’ answer goes to the heart of the matter, summing up all the law and all the prophets in two simple commands: first, love God; and second, love your neighbour as yourself. The first is “the greatest,” he says, but the second is “like it.”

On another occasion, receiving a similar answer, his questioner countered with, “and who is my neighbour?” Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Perhaps the Jews focused on love of God and neglected love of neighbour. Certainly that is what the Book of Exodus suggests, with its detailed explanations of what love of neighbour entails.

However, perhaps we today tend to we make the opposite mistake. “I don’t know much about God or religion,” people say, “but I do love my neighbour.”

Ignoring Jesus’ statement that love of God is “the greatest and first commandment,” we fall back upon his comforting assertion that we will be saved if we give food, drink, welcome, clothing, comfort, or companionship to one of his “least brothers.” (We do not notice that here, Jesus was talking about the salvation of “the nations”: those who do not know God.)

We quote Leigh Hunt’s poem, in which Abou Ben Adhem woke one night to see an angel writing in a book “the names of those who love the Lord.” Hearing that his name was not included, Ben Adhem said, “I pray thee, then, write me as one who loves his fellow-men.” The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night, he presented a list of those “whom love of God had blest, and, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”

We do not read G.K. Chesterton’s response, entitled The Philanthropist, in which Ben Adhem explains his position, and the angel replies, “Labour in peace and love your fellow-men, and love not God, since men alone are dear; only fear God, for you have cause to fear.”

Why should we love our neighbours as ourselves? What right have they to be loved?

As our civilization drifts further and further from Christianity, many honest people are asking this question. Finding no answer (for there is no answer outside Christianity), they are deciding, quite logically, that certain people have no right to be loved: the unborn, the elderly, the mentally and physically handicapped.

The Church asserts that our neighbours, all of them, have the right to be loved because every person without exception is made in the image and likeness of God: free, responsible, immortal, able to reason, capable of judging and choosing between good and evil and between truth and untruth. Apart from this assertion, there is no logical basis whatsoever for what the world calls human rights: what the Church calls human “dignity,” meaning human value.

As St. John Paul II said in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, the Church receives “the meaning of man” from Divine Revelation. “In order to know man, authentic man, man in his fullness, one must know God,” he said, quoting Pope Paul VI, who in turn had quoted St. Catherine of Siena: “In your nature, O eternal Godhead, I shall know my own nature.”

A merely human understanding of human value is not enough to guarantee human rights universally. For example, as Pope John Paul warned in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, we proclaim “the inviolable rights of the person,” rights “inherent in every person and prior to any constitution and state legislation,” but “we deny or trample upon the very right to life.”

The First Commandment is to turn from idols “to serve a living and true God,” as St. Paul says, by keeping his name and his day holy. Let us not kid ourselves, like Abou ben Adhem, that we will continue to keep the second if we do not keep the first.