Saturday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, and strength. These are the commands we receive from Moses today. And in case we’re wondering how seriously we should take these commands, Moses underscores the point with additional commands: drill them into your children, speak of them wherever you are, make reminders of them, wear them on your wrist and even on your forehead so you never forget them.
If you think you just don’t have time for all that today, know that God’s not interested in the length of your to-do list. In God’s way of seeing things, you can never be too busy to proclaim your love for God.
Okay! Got the memo. But what does it mean to live into these commands? How do I love God with all my heart, soul, and strength? What does that mean? It sounds good but also pretty abstract. How am I, to borrow the language of a scientist or social scientist, supposed to operationalize that? That is, how do I make that concrete and clear so that I might know from one day to the next that I am following these commands?
What follows in the text for today is no instruction manual for loving God with all I’ve got. Of course, elsewhere in the Bible, Jesus makes very clear (perhaps all too clear for the comfort of many) what living out of these commandments means: love your neighbor (even if you don’t like them), ease the suffering of the poor (even if you think they deserve their lot), take care of the sick (even if you find them “unclean”), visit those in prison (even if you think they got what they deserve), welcome the stranger (even if their ways don’t make sense to you) and so forth.
So, what about the reading for today? Does it have anything to teach us about how to love God with all we’ve got?
A cherished, perhaps even sacred, belief in the US is that, in the end, all that we have and all that we achieve and all that we are is of our own making. If our lives are marked by success, we can pat ourselves on the back. If not, then (if we’re honest) we know who to blame. And it is us.
This belief, it turns out, can be very reassuring as it provides so much apparent clarity in a bewildering world. With it as our guide, we know why some folks succeed while others fail, who is deserving and who is not, who should be venerated and who denigrated.
But this belief, with all its power to make sense of great and even disturbing disparities in the human family, forgets something crucial. Especially for people like me, who have so much, it is all too tempting to put my faith in myself—my hard work, my abilities, my achievements.
Ah, me of little faith, Jesus admonishes me today. Where do you think that fine city of Dayton that you thrive in came from? You surely did not build it. Where do you think the ingredients for that nutritious dinner you just made came from? You surely did not cultivate the ground in which they grew or raise the livestock that supplied them. Where do you think that clean water that you drink or cook with came from? You definitely did not dig the well or lay the pipes for that.
In short, Moses and Jesus tell me today, I forget God. I forget God whenever I think I am running the show. I am the one in charge. I should get all the credit.
I may work hard, but that is not the whole story. Not by a longshot.
My prayer today: May I live humbly in the persistent recognition that so much that I am tempted to call my success is owed to others and, ultimately to God. And may such humility lay the foundation for me to love God fully and thus, all God’s children, “deserving” or not as well.
—Susan Trollinger