Homily Notes 3rd Sunday of Lent 2018
3rd Sunday of Lent, “Which Commandment is the Most Important?”
“Hear O Israel the Lord your God is Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and all your soul.” The prayer I have just uttered is the beginning of the Shema, the prayer that devout Jews say at the beginning and end of every day. Christianity has added the phrase. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus was asked by a man to sum up the law and the prophets in short teaching. He did that in these words.
When we read of it the two great commands of Jesus we see they are the perfect summation of the ten commandments. When we look at the Ten commandments we notice that there is a natural division between the first three and the last seven. The first three cover the moral precepts regarding God. The last seven speak of how we are to treat our neighbor.
If we look at Jewish religious law, though, there are far more religious rules than just the 10 commandments. A cursory reading of the Pentateuch (the first five books) of the Bible tells us that. In all there were 613 laws in the Jewish faith. The laws covered a multitude of things. For instance, there were dietary laws which spoke of what people were to eat, how they were to prepare it, as well as how they were to eat it. Also, there were a host of laws that covered worship as well.
We Christians simplify Jewish religious law by distilling everything into the Ten Commandments. A person following the Jewish faith would probably tell us that the law of Moses is about much more than the Ten Commandments. Moses was the great law giver, but he expanded on the law he brought down from Mt. Sinai, because there were more moral questions that had to be answered.
The other error that we seem to make as Christians is that we tend to be real scrupulous about a few of the commandments while we dismiss others as unimportant.
A parish was celebrating First Reconciliation. All the second graders, at a certain point, lined up to make their confessions to the pastor. The children had the typical sins you might expect. The priest heard about fights between brothers and sisters. He heard about cheating. He had children who confessed the fact they lied on occasion. But a girl came to the priest. She knelt behind the screen. She said in a sad voice, “Bless me Father for I have sinned this is my First Reconciliation.” The priest said, “Yes, my child, what do you want to confess?” The girl said, “Father I fought with my brother three times, I lied twice, and I committed adultery.” The priest nearly fell off his chair. He said, “You committed adultery?” Yes,” the girl said, “You know adultery. I disobeyed my parents.” The little girl obviously thought that she need to mention a violation of a commandment in confession, so she picked the sixth one.
Many people seem to have a similar fixation with the sixth commandment. When we think about serious sin our thoughts tend to move in that direction. But the thing we could ask is what about the other commandments? We notice that the law of Moses does not say that commandment one, five and seven are important while the rest of the commandments are not. No, they all seem to carry equal moral weight. Yet, we are concerned about some of the commandments while we are not too worried about others.
Take the third commandment, for instance, “Remember to keep holy the Lord’s day.” How many people skip worship on the Christian Sabbath (Sunday)? How many Christians work, shop, and do a host of other activities on the Sabbath. An orthodox Jew will not even turn on a light switch on their Sabbath day. Years ago, almost all businesses would shut down on Sunday except essential services. Truly, it was a day of rest.
We realize that this commandment is not about just breaking a rule, but there is a divine wisdom behind the commandments. In our frazzled world where is so much activity all the time we never get the rest we need. We need a sabbath time.
We can say that this is the way it is with the rest of the commandments. We find the wisdom behind the law of God only if we take time to pray and reflect on it. The Jewish people felt that meditating on the law of God was a spiritual pursuit. Such meditation led to living a righteous life. Lent is a time where we examine our conscience. We ask the question, “How can I lead a more devout life so that I may be more like Jesus?” Studying the moral guidance of scripture can point us in the right direction. Jesus does not call us to rigidity, but he does call us to love of God and neighbor. Putting the command to love into practice means that we always want to follow the Lord’s way not our way. As Christians, we must be willing to seek the Lord’s will with humility and follow it.