Nine chapters on in the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Jesus engages in a disputation with some of his fellow Jews known as Sadducees, when asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus replies with no hesitation: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37).
It is a bit unusual for Jesus to interact with the Sadducees. Normally, he engaged with the Pharisees. This is not only because there were more of them. I am convinced that he engaged the most with the Pharisees because they were most like him.
Pharisees were what we might call “evangelical Jews.” They were Jews who sought to serve God by adhering to the Law of Moses and encouraging their fellow Jews to do the same. Whenever you hear or read about a Gentile in the Gospels who is either very well-disposed toward the Jewish people and their religion, or who is in the process of converting to Judaism, or who has converted, this is likely due to the efforts of the Pharisees.
What mainly distinguishes the Sadducees is that they did not believe in the resurrection. As those who attended very biblically based Sunday School were taught: because they didn’t believe in the resurrection, they were sad, you see. Sadducees tended to be wealthier Jews with higher social status. They also rejected the oral interpretive tradition of the Torah. Today such Jews are called Karaite Jews. Many do not hold any writings to be scripture apart from the five books that constitute the Torah.
Their main reason for rejecting the resurrection is that nowhere is such a teaching explicitly found in the Torah. Regarding the various Judaisms of his day, Jesus was theologically more aligned with the Pharisees than with any of the others.
My reason for invoking a different passage in my reflection this evening is to show how serious Jesus was about the love of God being “the greatest and the first commandment” (Matt 22:38). Loving God above everyone and everything else is not as easy as it sounds. But it is the one thing necessary. It’s almost a truism to say that loving Jesus more than you love anyone else enables you to love everyone else much more.
A painting of Rabia of Basra (c. AD 714/718-752)
In our time and culture, most of us are thoroughly convinced that we can have it all, we can do it all. This is self-deception, something to which human beings are fatally prone. This is even revealed sometimes in the way we talk about salvation. In our thinking and speaking about salvation, we often fall into the same trap as the one into which the Pharisees fell.
This can be broadly described as mistaking means for ends and turning God’s economy of grace, which is an economy of gift, into an economy of exchange. In short, if your religious practices do not lead you to a deeper love of God and neighbor then they remain just that- religious practices, an empty form, a shell of spirituality.
The latter of these takes the form of believing God will bless me, that is, give me the things I want when I do good and, conversely, believing that God will withhold these things from me when I disobey him. What this ignores, apart from the fact that it shows no theoretical or experiential knowledge of God, is a complaint that comes up in the Psalms and other places in the Old Testament with some frequency. Namely, the complaint that the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper.
Such an observation, sadly, sometimes quite accurate, brings into bold relief the theological necessity of believing in life everlasting. Not only is this not all there is, but what God has in store for those who love him is unimaginable (1 Cor 2:9).
I can think of no better way to express the love we need to have for God than in the words of the holy woman Rabia of Basra, which is in modern-day Iraq, who lived in the eighth century:
My God, if it is from fear of hell that I serve Thee, condemn me to burn in hell; and if it is for the hope of Paradise, forbid me entrance there; but if it is for Thy sake only, deny me not the sight of Thy face (Parabola, Fall 2023, “Saints & Sinners.” “A Holy Life,” by Claud Field: 114-121)What Rabia and other mystics grasp is that we don’t love God for what God can give us. We love God for himself. As Christians- Rabia was a Shi’ite Muslim (isn't it interesting that, nonetheless, she longs to see the face of God?- a pretty Christian way of speaking)- we can love God because he sent his Son, Jesus Christ.
It is in and through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that God deigns to share divine life with us. The essence of this divine life, as the Incarnation amply demonstrates, is self-sacrificing love. This becomes awesomely real in the Eucharist, which we are about to receive.
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