The 30th Sunday of the Year Ex 22:20-26; 1 Thess 1:5-10; Mt 22:34-40 (Year A)
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell this to the sons of Israel. You must not molest the stranger or oppress him, for you lived as strangers in the land of Egypt.” At the heart of the law entrusted to Moses was the repeated injunction to care for the poor and needy, frequently identified with “the stranger in your midst, the widow and the orphan”. These broad categories gave a special place to the powerless, to those without a voice.
Further instructions guarded the poor from exploitation: “If you lend money to any poor man, you must not demand interest from him. If you take another’s cloak as a pledge, you must return it before sunset. It is all the covering he has.”
Such instructions were more than the financial arrangements of a primitive society; they were the expression of the fundamental relationship between God and his people.
The tribes of Israel existed only because the God of Israel had heard their cry in Egypt. In love he had responded to their need, and therefore they themselves were called to the same compassion. “If the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, it was not because you outnumbered other peoples: you were the least of all peoples. It was for love of you that the Lord brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery.”
No society can operate without law. Thus the commandments entrusted to Moses developed over the centuries into a complex body of legislation governing every aspect of life. At the time of Jesus, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were its guardians, frequently using its precepts to safeguard their own interests.
In asking Jesus to judge which was the greatest commandment of the Law, they were seeking to entrap him in a blind labyrinth of their own making. In his answer Jesus took them back to the salvation that had called both the Law and God’s people into being: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.”
The same Lord comes to us in our need, and if we are to become like him, nothing can absolve us from a duty to reach out to need in its many forms.
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