Today’s readings: Exodus 22, 20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1, 5-10; Matthew 22, 34-40.
In the Bible, remembering is much more than just nostalgia. The treasured narrative memory of Israel in the first reading from Exodus is easily transposable to our contemporary practice. It is a political-economic memory about the time when the Israelites were slaves. It was an oppressive experience which turns out to be so familiar to the memory still shared by many peoples and individuals today.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes: “We have invested our lives in consumerism, we have a love-affair with ‘more’, and we will never have enough.” This seems to be the new ethic that on the one hand shapes our lives, while on the other warps the great commandment of love and creates several new forms of poverty and exclusion.
It is a sense of belonging that shapes our identity as humans and gives the feeling of security we need in daily life. Yet the world, as things are, no longer offers a home to an alarmingly increasing multitude.
We continue to grip in search of a remedy to the same old ethic that has driven the world into the present economic and humanitarian disaster. Pope Francis recently warned that one of the most serious risks of our age is the divorce of economy and morality. The market, which offers new opportunities and ample technological novelty, seems to have no ethical restraints. And the tragedy is written on the wall.
Exodus is the book from which today’s first reading is taken. But Exodus is also the book which is still being written, narrating the continuous movement of displaced people, of those who are estranged, exiled from where they belong. Like the Israelites in times of oppression, we are begged to look deep into our own heart and acknowledge ourselves as ‘guilty bystanders’.
The commandment of love which Jesus in the gospel says is the greatest of all commandments, denotes the need for justice in the way we treat each other. Justice is that concrete and down to earth aspect of love which consolidates relationships and enhances the possibility of a greater and more humane social cohesion.
The experience of estrangement of Israel in Exodus seen in connection with the commandment of love enunciated by Jesus highlights an aspect of Christian living which in our times is grossly neglected. We invest so much in well-being. Yet the mechanisms of society itself, those political, cultural, economic and even religious, continue to create multitudes of strangers, of people who belong less and are homeless in the deepest sense of the word.
The tragedy is that knowingly or unknowingly the world is becoming less and less hospitable for more and more. And in the midst of the comforts promised and provided, we continue for most of the time to be in denial. Many people today simply do not belong: whether they are unborn babies, unwanted children, abused people, victims of domestic violence, those bullied and left bleeding, or those discriminated against for a variety of reasons.
The commandment of love can only be translated as a call for justice. If there is no justice there is no love, no peace, no harmony, no cohesion. There is only rejection, and this is marking many people’s lives today, from birth till old age.
From primitive times, all religions were all meant to heal this wound. But unfortunately, religion at times easily lends itself to uphold the status quo. The cultured despisers of religion are often proved right in their claim that religion, rather than healing the world, many a time fosters violence and perpetuates conflicts in the heart of humanity.
When Jesus projects the commandment of love as the greatest of commandments, he is simply claiming that it is only love translated as justice that can heal the world. Love of God without love of neighbour is blasphemous. It leads nowhere to believe in Christ in our midst in the form of bread and wine as long as we refuse to let him change our ways and desist from our complicity with so many social and religious mechanisms of exclusion.