31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, B October 31, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
[No recording this week.]
This is a rare moment in the Gospel. Why? Most of the time, when someone asks Jesus a question, he responds with another question or parable or warning. He rarely just answers the question plain and simple. There are many reasons for this – the question was a trap, the answer is not a piece of information but a change of heart, or the answer is beyond words and Jesus is trying to invite wonder and mystery.
Yet, the full exchange with this particular scribe points us to what makes this scenario different. “When Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’” Put another way, the person asking the question was sincere. Jesus answered the question because the scribe genuinely wanted an answer, because the answer was straightforward, and because the scribe was the kind of person to be able to actually take the answer to heart.
Jesus’ situation among the Jews was complicated. He was himself a Jew. Even more, as God, he is literally the one who created the Jewish religion. He is the God who gave the law, who commanded that sacrifices be offered, who told the Jews they were His chosen people. Through over a thousand years of trials and changes, the Jewish people were forged into a unique people, rich with traditions, customs, and language built on the edifice of God’s own design.
This was visible, tangible to the people of his day through hundreds of daily rituals, physical actions, memorized prayers. It was visible and external precisely because that’s what God wanted. His prophets of old promised to make Israel a light to the nations, to make the descendants of Abraham into a source of blessing for the rest of the world. The whole point of God calling this people was so that others could see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the holiness of God in the world.
And yet, it was precisely that external, visible aspect that threatened to completely undermine the whole plan. A few hundred years before Jesus, the Israelites were just as pagan as – maybe more pagan than their neighbors. They even practiced child sacrifice! But they still had the temple! They had the Levites and the priesthood and the rituals that God gave them. They had the history of God saving them from Egypt and other oppressors. These visible signs would protect them again, right? Wrong. They were conquered by Babylon and the temple was destroyed. Later, God once again freed them, sent them home and told them to rebuild the Temple, and they did.
And the sacrifices resumed, the external rituals once again became a visible sign of God’s holy people doing holy things… but the point was missed again, externals obscured the heart. But this scribe gets it. “To love… is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Not that the sacrifices were bad – God commanded them to be offered – but that they were ultimately just signs. Put another way, the sacrifice of a perfect lamb is a lesson to the person making the sacrifice. Animal blood does nothing, but the act of sacrificing something valuable just because God said so… that teaches us to put God first, reminds us that the things of this world are not as valuable as the one who created them.
This scribe gets it. To love God with your whole self and to love your neighbor is worth more than these sacrifices because the point of the sacrifices is to teach us to love. To teach us to think about God, to pray to God, to live for God, to sweat and work for God. Taking the product of a year’s worth of labor and simply setting it on fire is a powerful way of saying “all that I am and have is God’s.” And to love God means we love those made in his image. We love our neighbor because of God, not because we like them or they make us feel good or they make us happy. We love them for God’s sake.
But we can hide behind the externals, the rituals, the memorized prayers. We check the boxes without ever changing the heart, so priorities must be examined and re-aligned. This scribe shows understanding and yet, he’s only “not far” from the Kingdom. He’s not there yet. He’s stepped beyond the hypocrisy of merely external religion into a search for authentic love – this is a good step, necessary for all of us – but he hasn’t yet come around to the fullness of the kingdom.
What is love? How do I love God? He needs nothing from me, so what good can I possibly do to him? Just be nice to people? No. Jesus can be quite harsh, almost mean… and some of our greatest saints were extremely blunt. How do I love God? What is the difference between being near the kingdom and being in the kingdom, between knowing the importance of love – like this scribe – and actually living that love?
Jesus. The lesson to learn from a thousand years of Israelite sin, hypocrisy and failure is this: human beings can’t love God with their whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. Only God can love God they way he ought to be loved. So Jesus is God made man, God in man loving God for the sake of mankind. And how did Jesus love God and neighbor? He offered a sacrifice. Only, it wasn’t an animal. He “offered himself” as a sacrifice for sins, as the perfect external expression of perfect internal love. And all the sacraments are more than signs.
The way into the kingdom is to do as he did. It begins by recognizing that what pleases God is holiness of life, not mere ritual perfection. It matures with the realization that holiness of life requires self-denial, practice, and accountability. It comes to full stature with the understanding that human beings cannot live that way without God’s grace. It bears fruit when a soul comes to God through the external signs he himself gave us… when that soul – with heart, mind, and strength – truly participates in the sacrifice of Christ himself. We quite literally take Jesus into ourselves so that he can love God from within us, finally enabling us to love God as we ought: internally, externally, whole-heartedly. The sacraments are not an excuse not to love. Love is not an excuse to ignore the sacraments.
What is the most important thing in our religion? Jesus answers that question with two things: a quote from scripture and his example, An invisible love made visible through signs and sacrifices. The question is, will we follow both? Or neither? Because in the end, you can’t have one without the other.