What's It All About (Alfie)?

Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today’s Gospel reading carries a story that is very familiar because we meet it in different guises in all three of the synoptic Gospels. It is so familiar that one is inclined to be really bored at hearing it once again. It is so fatally easy to mistake familiarity for understanding or even for assimilation and implementation of the message. In short, we dare not assume that there is nothing new to learn by reflecting on it.

Like so much else in the story of Jesus, the question that is posed by the Pharisees has a long Jewish history. There had been so many attempts to reduce the 613 commandments found in the Torah to a small and manageable number. Obviously, any teacher in Israel might have engaged in a discussion of the greatest commandment and would reveal what he thought most important. Such a discussion would aid in providing a focus to one’s spiritual life and religious commitment. There is, however, a hidden disadvantage to distilling the commandments into such a short statement; namely, the danger of reducing the law of God to a general and vague statement.

However, St. Matthew’s short account of this exchange is accompanied in the lectionary by a reading from the Book of Exodus which is anything but vague. Molesting or oppressing an alien, wronging a widow or orphan, extorting the poor by charging interest on a loan, taking one’s neighbor’s cloak as something of an I.O.U. are all actions which stir God’s wrath. God promises to hear the cry of aliens, widows, orphans, and the poor with compassion and will strike anyone who presumes to engage in such activity with death itself. In short, God’s anger will turn the tables against people who act this way. If the simple commandment to love God above everything and one’s neighbor as oneself sounds vague, it is not so within its proper context of the teaching of the Torah which is being summarized.

St. Paul, who had grasped that message in depth, is often brutally concrete about its application, listing actions and attitudes which he considers a travesty of Christian life and juxtaposing them with a description of relationships and responses that do indeed fulfill the greatest commandment and its inseparable second. His reflections in today’s passage from his First Letter to the Thessalonians are interesting in the context of the other two readings. While the reading from the Book of Exodus might excuse people who had not heard the Gospel, St. Paul insists that those who place their faith in Jesus are not in the dark; they know what is expected of them as followers of Jesus Christ. St. Paul’s idea of a sober, practical response to their faith is to make love and the hope of salvation one’s protective armor. His reason for that is that God does not intend to destroy but to save.

One might think that the protective armor of faith and love and hope of salvation is intended in a purely metaphorical sense to parry the blows of temptation. However, read between the text from Exodus and the Gospel of St. Matthew, St. Paul’s thinking is clearly concerned with social conditions and social justice for the powerless. It would seem that the theological and anthropological virtues of faith, hope, and love are expected to serve in quite practical ways in the ordering of society and its public affairs.

Jesus makes it much simpler. By quoting the “Sh’ma Israel,” the basic profession of faith for the Jews, and by linking it with a summing up of the social obligations of the law, he makes all depend simply on a life lived out of love. This is his answer to a question that can be asked for various reasons and with various motivations, as the three synoptic Gospels indicate. St. Matthew’s Pharisee asks the question as part of a group strategy to trap Jesus. St. Mark’s Pharisee, on the other hand, asks because he sees that Jesus is very wise and because he really wants to learn from the answer that Jesus might give. St. Luke’s lawyer knows the answer well enough himself, but he wants to excuse himself by complicating the matter with subtle distinctions. Jesus answers the lawyer’s excuse with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Taking all three of the readings for today’s liturgy into consideration, I am reminded of a popular song from 1966, written by Burt Bacharach: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” As Dionne Warwick so beautifully crooned: “I believe in love, Alfie. Without true love we just exist, Alfie. Until you find the love you've missed, you are nothing, Alfie.”