Loving God

Smartphones are an almost miraculous device.

It plays music, it talks, it takes videos and photos, it can pay our bill at the restaurant, and it allows you to search the useful and useless tidbits.

If smartphones had been around in Jesus’ time, the commandments would have been available on an app. The scribe’s question might have been: “Which app on your cell phone is the greatest?” Jesus might have answered, “The big red heart-shaped app that tells you to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The words we hear Jesus speak in the Gospel are not new. If this commandment, ‘to love God with all your being and to love your neighbor as yourself’, is so well known, why is it recorded in the Gospels?

Perhaps, as one writer notes, it is because much like Christians in our own time, Jesus’ compatriots needed to be reminded of what was most essential. While Jewish tradition holds that there are 613 commandments found within the Torah, Jesus is saying that in loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves we are in fact keeping them all.

It is easy to get caught up in details and thorny issues much like the Herodians, Pharisees, Sadducees, chief priests and scribes who question Jesus about authority, taxes and resurrection prior to today’s Gospel. None of their questions get to the heart of what it means to live a life worthy of the kingdom of God.

As the end of the church year approaches, we can ask ourselves, are there places we have strayed from the essential core of Jesus’ message? Do my actions and my very being communicate reverence for God and reverence for neighbor? When they do, like the scribe in today’s Gospel, we are not far from the kingdom of God.

Tuesday is the final day of voting. Even though many of us may be weary from the campaigns, we have the responsibility to vote. At a recent meeting of Sartell pastors, one pastor’s prayer is that no matter who wins the election, divisions will end. Or viewed from today’s Gospel, do our words and actions after the election show our love of God and neighbor or do we show ourselves to be liars?

On a personal note… Thank you for the cards and condolences on my father’s death (October 11th). Your words and cards are very comforting and appreciated.

At 95, my dad lived a full life. He was greatly blessed, and was a blessing to my family and others.

Fr. Ron