Dear Parishioner,

Matthew chapter 22 is interesting for a number of reasons:  last Sunday’s gospel  we had the Pharisees and Herodians trying to trap Jesus with the taxes question to Caesar;  shortly thereafter he silences the Sadducees when they try to trick him with a question about the state of marriage after resurrection (a bit of a sneaky one since they didn’t believe in the resurrection in the first place);  in today’s gospel, the Pharisees try again to test Him:  ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’  This too might prove to be a bit tricky, or so they hoped, as there were over 600 laws Jesus could choose from, covering every conceivable human activity: worship, loans, gift giving, parenting, violence, theft, food, sexual intercourse, Sabbath rest and so on. 

Jesus however does not choose one commandment, and in a sense neither does He choose two.  What he does is to clarify the underlying foundation of love that all the law and prophecy is built on – living in relationships of love to God and neighbour is the essence.   The first reading from Leviticus is quite unambiguous:  the Israelites were commanded to love the stranger as they loved themselves – love the stranger then for you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt. As Christians we too are commanded to love our neighbour, which implies loving the stranger in our midst.  And who is the stranger in our midst?  It is not always the person we don’t know but it is sometimes the person we don’t want to know, the person we refuse to love.  We are I believe in need of strangers and neighbours to test the quality of our mercy. And yes, Christ comes to us in the form of bread and wine but also in the form of the stranger seeking welcome; in ministering to the stranger, we minister to Christ:  I was a stranger and you welcomed me. 

So what then might be our motivation for loving the stranger in our midst.  Is it because the law commands us, as implied in the Pharisee’s question above, where ‘doing’ is just enough or is it something else?  Jack Shea tells the story about a busy man who one day heads out the door for work, stepping over his three-year-old son as he goes, pats him on the head as he goes and makes to his car.   Her suddenly feels a terrible sense of guilt.  “What am I doing?” he says, “I am ignoring my son.  I never play with him, and he’ll be grown up before I know it” as he hears echoes of Harry Chapin’s ballad to lost fatherhood Cat’s in the Cradle. The father returned to the house, sat down with his son and began to build blocks.  After two minutes, the boy said: ‘Daddy, why are you mad at me?” Playing blocks out of guilt is not the same thing as playing blocks out of love and the difference is quickly spotted even by a three-year-old. Doing something because it is expected is not, after all, the same as doing something from the heart. 

Deacon Alex