A reflection on Matthew 22:1-14 for Thursday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time.
When Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest, he answers with remarkable simplicity: love God, and love your neighbor. That is the heart of it.
Of course, we Christians have spent centuries building laws, traditions, catechisms, commentaries, policies, committees, and—because we are human—the occasional argument conducted with tremendous confidence and very little charity. Still, Jesus keeps bringing us back to love.
Not sentimentality. Not niceness. Not avoiding every difficult truth. Love.
That raises an uncomfortable question for the Church and for each of us. If a teaching, practice, custom, or way of exercising authority consistently produces contempt, humiliation, exclusion, or despair, can we simply assume that it reflects the heart of the Gospel? Or do we need to ask whether we have lost the plot somewhere?
Jesus does not say that love replaces truth. He says that love of God and love of neighbor are the foundation on which everything else rests. That means love is not decorative. It is not the ribbon we tie around doctrine after the serious work is finished. It is the measure by which the rest must be judged.
Religious people can become very skilled at defending principles while forgetting the person standing in front of them. We can be technically correct and spiritually cruel. We can quote the right teaching and use it like a weapon. We can become so concerned with protecting the truth that we fail to notice the human being who has just been wounded by the way we delivered it. Then, if we are not careful, we congratulate ourselves for being faithful.
Jesus makes that difficult.
To love our neighbor means that the neighbor is never merely an issue. The divorced Catholic is not a case. The gay Catholic is not a problem to be solved. The woman questioning her place in the Church is not a threat. The person who has left the Church is not a cautionary tale. The immigrant is not a political category, and the poor are not a talking point. They are people, neighbors, beloved by God before we have decided what we think about them.
This does not mean that love is easy agreement. Anyone who has lived in a family for more than twenty minutes knows that love and agreement are not the same thing. Love can challenge. Love can tell the truth. Love can set boundaries and confront injustice. But love does not delight in humiliation. It does not reduce people to their failures, use shame as a shortcut to holiness, or make belonging conditional on becoming less inconvenient.
That last point may be especially challenging for the Church because institutions naturally prefer order, while people are untidy.
Real lives do not always fit comfortably into neat categories. Families are complicated. Faith develops unevenly. People make decisions we do not understand. Some remain close to the Church while questioning its teachings. Others walk away after being hurt. Some come back. Some do not. And still Jesus says: love your neighbor. Not after they become easier to understand, not after they agree with us, and not after they get their life sorted out. Now.
Psalm 107 speaks of people in distress crying out to God and being rescued. God does not first ask whether their circumstances are tidy enough to deserve compassion. God responds. Mercy does not deny truth; it reveals something true about God.
Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones gives us another image. God breathes life into what appears completely dead. Perhaps love does something similar. It creates space where people can breathe again. It tells the ashamed person that their story is not over, the excluded person that they are still seen, the person who has failed that repentance is possible, and the weary person that they do not have to earn their dignity.
Love gives life. If our religion consistently leaves people feeling more dead than alive, that should trouble us. Not because every difficult teaching is wrong, and not because Christian discipleship should never cost us anything, but because Jesus gives us a test: love God and love your neighbor. Everything hangs on these.
That includes our rules, our traditions, our institutions, our preaching, our leadership, our conversations, and perhaps especially our certainty. The question is not simply, “Am I right?” The deeper question is, “Does the way I hold what I believe make me more capable of loving?” Does it make me more patient, more compassionate, more willing to listen, more concerned with another person’s dignity, and more attentive to those who are easily dismissed?
If not, something has gone wrong.
Jesus gives us no permission to separate holiness from love. We may not always know exactly what love requires. Sometimes it will be costly. Sometimes it will be uncomfortable. Sometimes it will ask us to speak, and sometimes it will ask us to stop speaking and listen for a change.
But the measure remains the same: love God, love your neighbor, and when we are unsure whether we are doing Christianity correctly, that is probably not a bad place to begin.
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