XXXI SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - Mark 12:28-34
Twice a day, in the morning and the evening prayers, the faithful Jew recites the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.” (words taken from Dt 6:4-6). It is a prayer and a profession of faith with implications for how we live and situate ourselves in society and the world.
However, in this world of ours, society, in general, has lost its reference to God. We live as if He does not exist. If He did, He has died. Indeed, some people proclaim that God is dead. We have thrown Him out of our lives since He was an obstacle to our freedom. With all our hearts and minds, we want to be the masters of our lives and our world. However, despite all our efforts, that is no more than wishful thinking. At any moment, the raw power of nature shows itself, escaping any attempt at controlling it. A society without God is a society that has lost its way. Time and again, we go through the experience of Adam and Eve. In their audacity to become gods, they rejected God’s Law and established themselves as the rule by which good and evil can be measured. And society turned upside down: evil became good, and good became evil.
We must reassert God’s centrality in our lives and society. When we live by faith, God alone is the absolute, and everything else is relative. And our God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, sets us free, accepting us as his beloved children.
Guiding themselves by the Torah, the Jewish People found 613 commandments that must be followed. One may ask: how could they follow so many commandments? And which one is the first and the most important? During Jesus’ time, that was a big point of discussion. That’s why a scribe asked Jesus: “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus answered, reciting the Shema. The greatest commandment is: “… you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” We may say that this is the only commandment since the second one is the natural sequence of the first: “You must love your neighbour as yourself.” We cannot love God without loving our neighbour.
Jesus makes it clear that we do not need so many commandments. Two are enough, and these two can be reduced to a single word: love. God is love, and those who live their lives in God live them in love. If we do that, then we are on the way to the Kingdom of God.
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