30th Sunday in Ord. Time – 25th October 2020 — Gospel: Mt 22,34-40
Loving one’s Neighbour and Stranger
Jesus was asked for one greatest commandment, but he goes further and adds ‘a second’ that, he says, ‘is like it.’ Wholehearted love of God means to see other people as God sees them, and all people as the objects of God’s love. Therefore anyone who truly loves God with all his being must and will love others as God loves oneself personally.
Love of God entails one’s whole being: heart (centre of knowing and willing as well as feeling), mind, soul (one’s whole life and energies). For the Hebrew word for “heart” in English means heart, will and mind. Love is not so much a matter of feeling, but a matter of doing. Love of God is a commitment to listen to God’s word and to obey his will. Keeping a theocentric outlook, Matthew stresses that there is a second commandment which likens to the first: love your neighbour as yourself (Lev 19,18; Mt 5,43; 19,19). Love of God makes possible a love of others that transcends natural friendship, convenience and self-interest (5,43-48). Love of others is the test of the reality of one’s love of God (1 Jn 4,20). The canon of love both binds us to the heart of the law as God’s will and frees us from the law when it deteriorates into unjust reasoning.
In Leviticus ch.19, the command to love your neighbour as yourself is closely linked with the command to love the alien (stranger) as yourself. We are familiar that in Lev 19,18 the command to love your neighbor as yourself is found. Yet, not many verses later, we find the command to love the stranger in Lev 19,34 . This proximity invites us to relate the theme of neighbour and stranger. In many communities there are “neighbours” who are really “strangers” or vice versa. These are people who are in the immediate neighbourhood who have no relationship with us and with the church. If we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, then these strangers are to be loved as our neighbours. We need to reach out to these people without trying to evangelize them or use them for our own advantage. Sometimes it is hard to love them, because these are people who don’t look with our perspective, who don’t reason out from our view point, who don’t share our faith, and who don’t make as much money as we make. But we need to have a completely new understanding of them and of our role, because it is connected to love of God, i.e., to see other people as God sees them. Therefore what Jesus meant regarding “love your neighbour as yourself” is applicable in today’s context also for “love your stranger as yourself”. Indeed, they are not such different categories at all.
