This Sunday, Jesus Names the Church’s Greatest Failure (and Greatest Hope)

The greatest failure of the Church in our time is not the abuse crisis, it isn’t the lack of catechesis, and it’s not the liturgy. Our failure to follow what Jesus commands in the Gospel reading this Sunday, the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A, is at the root of all of those.

Here are six takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The Gospel shows us another test Jesus endured in the days before the Passion.

As the liturgical year winds down, the Gospel readings we hear at Sunday Mass show various adversaries taking turns trying to best Jesus. Last week, the Herodians teamed up with the Pharisees to challenge him about taxes. In Matthew, the Sadducees followed, challenging the Resurrection with a wild story about a widow who married seven brothers.

This Sunday’s Gospel starts: “When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking ‘Teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?”

Jesus escapes this trap the way he escaped the others. Their tests assume that God is an impersonal, legalistic entity that we need to placate. Jesus knows God is a person — a loving Father, not a powerful bureaucrat.

The greatest commandment Jesus cites is a form of the shema declaration his Jewish audience all learned as children and recited daily. Jesus says it this way: “You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

The second greatest commandment “is like it,” Jesus says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Second: In other words, God wants us to love him with everything we have.

Loving God “with all your heart” means putting him at the top of every priority list; “with all your soul” means giving him every aspect of our lives, including our moral choices, and “with all your mind” means devoting our intellects to him, also. And the second commandment is like it, because it directs our love toward what is most godlike on earth: ourselves and our neighbors made in his image and likeness.

We tend to get this exactly backwards. All sin is idolatry, our attempt to put something else in God’s place on our priority list. We think it’s silly that people once worshiped a golden bull, but that was a dazzling symbol of wealth, virility and power for an earlier age. Today we have new idols of money, pleasure and control that we worship.

For us, the greatest commandment might be “Love yourself above all else, and those things which enhance your image.” We love the fashion and consumer goods we use to define ourselves; we love our streaming entertainment and social media, personalized to our tastes; and we commit our intellects to whatever political party best reflects us.

And instead of loving others as we love ourselves, our second commandment might be “love others to the degree they love you” — we serve those people who will pay us back; we spend time with those people who delight us or benefit us; and we love God insofar as he supports and affirms this whole system that has us as its center.

In short, we are the center of a bubble that reflects our own image back to us.

Third: We can learn from the Thessalonians and Israelites how to break free.

The Second Reading is St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, one of the earliest books ever written in the New Testament. It shows what loving God above all else looks like.  In it, we see the surprise and excitement that Paul has in meeting early Christians who are loving God in a new way.

Despite “great affliction,” they have gone from being “imitators” of the disciples to “a model for all the believers” in the region, filled with “joy from the Holy Spirit.” Above all, they have “turned to God from idols” and now “serve the living and true God.”

This is what loving God above everything else looks like: a joyful group living in a new way, detaching themselves from those things which dethroned God in their hearts: the idols of pleasure, power, and wealth.

And what does it mean to “love your neighbor as yourself”? The First Reading covers that one. From Exodus, we hear: “Thus says the Lord: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.’” You shall not make money from others’ misfortunes; you can’t live off of interest exacted from others, and “You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.”

Fourth: And this happens to be what the Church needs most today.

The two greatest reasons people leave the faith have a lot to do with the two greatest commandments. They lapse over the love of God, when they don’t think God really cares what they do with their time, or when they love something he forbids more than they love him. They also lapse over human love: Someone in the Church offended them; the parish was cold and unwelcoming; or religion became a duty that didn’t touch their relationships.

Those who stay in the Church say that their relationship with Jesus Christ fills them with purpose and meaning, and they want to share that meaning and purpose with those they care about.

Love of God and neighbor is the glue that holds the Church together. Without love of God, the Church is just a club — and not a very good one. And without the love of neighbor, the Church is just a theological fellowship or liturgical society.

Fifth: The truth is, loving God and neighbor doesn’t come automatically. Here is how to start.

To fulfill the greatest commandment:

1. Love God with all your heart — by talking to him, heart to heart. Try a Holy Hour, the Rosary, and/or a daily meditation — find help for each here.
2. Love God with all your soul — by dethroning your idols. Give up the things that lead you away from him — give money away, learn to fast from the thing that grasps you, and relinquish control through humility and obedience.
3. Love God with all your mind — through study. You can’t love God if you don’t know him. Spiritual reading — or listening — is a necessity. Father Mike Schmitz, Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic Answers, or Benedictine College’s resources here under the Watch or  Listen tabs are a start.

To fulfill the second greatest commandment:

1. Appreciate your neighbor “as yourself.” Don’t judge people, and emphasize their strengths over their weaknesses — just as you do with yourself!
2. Serve your neighbor as you serve yourself. Do the things for others that you wish others would do for you: pour coffee; call (or text) that loved one who appreciates calls (or texts); pray for others in the way you hope they pray for you. Then find places to donate or volunteer (pray for one to present itself!).

As St. Ignatius put it, “One day we shall find in heaven as much repose and delight as we have dispensed in this life.”

Sixth: At each Mass God himself sets the example of this.

Jesus’s love for God above all else is so great that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One in love. But then he loves you above everything else in the world — more than the Grand Canyon, more than the Milky Way Galaxy, and more than St. Peter’s Basilica — because those are finite things whose worth is limited — but you are worth much more than them. God loves you infinitely and he loves your neighbor as he loves you.

And at each Mass, he proves it. God comes close to you, becoming small to be on your level. You see him in the host, wanting to become one with you — and with your neighbors. He asks you to love him with your heart, soul, and mind — but he loves you first with his body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Blessed Sacrament.

Returning the favor is the least we can do.

Image: pxhere

By Tom Hoopes