HOMILY FOR 30TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR A

HOMILY FOR 30TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR A

BY: Fr. Uchenna Onyejiuwa

Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, today’s lesson is on the greatest commandment. Again the Pharisees are back after their embarrassing and humiliating defeat last week with the Herodians, which is typical of every proud and feisty opponent. This time their purpose is not to entrap but to embarrass the master before his audience. The Sadducees had earlier made a similar attempt at embarrassing Him but failed woefully. So the Pharisees got together, and to disconcert him, in the words of today’s gospel pericope, posed the question: “Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?”

For an ordinary person, the question they came up with is quite difficult, it demands that you spontaneously choose not out of the Ten Commandments that we know but out of the 613 commandments and prohibitions in the Torah. In His response, just like He did with the question of tax payment, He introduced another crucial element by combining two commandments of the Law: absolute love of God (see Deut 6:5) and love of neighbour (see Lev 19:18), the one that His detractors have always neglected, the one that we also neglect. He then concluded by saying, “On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.” By introducing a second law in His response and by declining to place it as a second fiddle to the first law, Jesus reveals to us where His accent is.

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Jesus wants us to know that the two laws are inextricably interwoven, one can never be a lover of God who hates his neighbour. How can we claim to love God whom we do not see but fail to love our fellow men whom we see? The love of neighbour is simply the love of God in action, it is its praxis. So the greatest commandment is to love God in our neighbours (any person in need of our help, especially the weak and the less privileged). That is the law every Christian is called to respect and observe, and it is simply delusional to think otherwise. It is precisely the message of today’s first reading, where the Lord Himself commanded His people, through Moses His servant, to take care of strangers, widows and orphans, (those the bible designates as weak) and be nice to their poor debtors lest they incur His wrath. For us, and the Pharisees, the greatest commandment is the love of God but for God and our Lord Jesus Christ, the greatest commandment is the love we must give to ourselves.

Beloved friends, it’s quite paradoxical that we pride ourselves as followers and children of a God who is Love yet we live in so much hate. Whether you are theist or atheist it doesn’t matter, so long as you are living, love is at the core of your being because it is a fundamental principle of life without which life suffers. Therefore nothing justifies ANY PERSON to violate the commandment of love, whether religious or irreligious and we have no right to pick and choose whom to love and whom not to love. Greed for wealth and the inordinate quest for power are the only things making most people ignore this commandment, although we don’t acknowledge it; and this continuous disregard for this commandment has today brought humanity to the level of barbarians. Recently, we saw a video clip of a Uniport 400-level student who slaughtered his girlfriend just for money rituals. Honestly, it is quite worrisome to see the sanctity of human life trampled upon daily in this country and many other parts of the world. Every day we continue to sink deeper and deeper into this unfortunate barbaric condition with no sign of it abating. Where lies our civilisation?

Money, fame and power are now the only things that matter to many of us in our world today and we are loving them with all our hearts, all our souls and all our minds. We kill for money and power, we sell our fellow human beings for money and power, we blackmail for money and power, etc. The Mma di na Ndu anyi (the beauty of being human) has completely been besmirched. How do we get out of this mess? So, my dear friends, it is pertinent we take seriously this teaching of Christ today with a renewed understanding and a sense of urgency so that we can begin to retrace our steps and see how, through the help of the Holy Spirit, we can recover what is left of our humanity as a result of the gross disregard for this all-important commandment of God. May He forgive us and heal us. Peace be with you.

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