Friday in the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time, August 21, 2020

The Feast of St. Pope Pius X

Matthew 22:34-40

Just to let folks know: one of the priests here at Blessed Sacrament has tested positive for the coronavirus and so we are under quarantine,  the other three of us will get tested today, we hope.  The office will be closed for the next two weeks but we will try to have priests here for at least some of the Masses on
Sunday.  Please check the parish website for details.  As of right now, we all feel all right.

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 in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

Today’s reading directly follows the Lord’s encounter with the Sadducees, in which he was challenged on the doctrine of the Resurrection.  It is the only time we know of in which they approached him.  Following this encounter, the Pharisees resume their attempts to pin him down as to the basis for his teaching.  One of their band thus steps forward and asks him point blank: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  This is an identity test, asking the question, Who are you, and what do you believe?  It is also a test regarding the Lord’s beliefs about the law as a whole.  We recall that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus had already defended himself against the accusation that he claimed to have come to destroy the law (cf. Matthew 5, 17).  The opinion that the Lord denigrated the law arose because he had openly cured people on the Sabbath, an action which did not in fact break the law, but only the Pharisaic interpretation of the law. 

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  This was a question every Jew could answer because the answer was the Shema Israel, a prayer, blessing, and creed which a Jew would say twice a day, and which was carried in written form in the phylacteries which the Jews wore: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole strength. And these words which I command you this day, shall be in your heart: and you shall tell them to your children, and you shall meditate upon them sitting in your house, and walking on your journey, sleeping and rising.  And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be and shall move between your eyes. And you shall write them in the entry, and on the doors of your house” (Deuteronomy 6, 4-9).

This answer would have satisfied the Pharisee, but the Lord goes on to speak of the second law, “second” not in terms of numbering but in terms of importance: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This law is given in Leviticus 19, 18 in order to sum up a series of commandments regarding one’s behavior towards a fellow Jew.  This law, then, does not follow in consecutive order from the “first” commandment, and the Pharisees would not necessarily have put it as second in importance after this.  More likely, they would have put forward one of the Ten Commandments, such as the first, which forbids having “strange gods” before the true God, or the commandment imposing the Sabbath.  

Jesus has been asked a question.  St. Matthew indicates that with it the Pharisee was testing him, that is, challenging him.  By speaking of this second commandment, Jesus responds with his own challenge, and not merely a theological one, but one which threatened the authority of the Pharisees.  Because of their origin as a sect founded by men, little real basis existed for their own interpretations.  Jesus, however, comes out directly on his own authority, as established by the the divine power evident in his miracles, and defines the second commandment.  In the verses following this reading, Matthew tells how Jesus manifested his own authority as divine through the Scriptures.  In doing this, the Lord pushes them to look beyond the narrow confines of their sect in order to take seriously the claims he makes about himself.

We celebrate the Feast of St. Pope Pius X (d. 1914), a very simple, devout man of humble background.  During his papacy he fought against the heresy of modernism, temporarily checking its advance in the Church.  A childhood friend of mine who later became a priest in New York City rescued a large statue of St. Pius X, his patron saint, when he saw it being thrown out of a church during its “renovation” (this was in the Diocese of Richmond, VA).  He somehow got it up the stairs to his room and set it beside his bed, where it watched over him at night.  The episode is very emblematic of what happened to the Church in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and perhaps even today.  We pray for the intercession of this holy pope and ask God to grant his Church a true renewal of Faith and holiness so that it might lead the world to him.

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