Dear friends,
Today’s Gospel is the greatest commandment, and Pope Leo XIV preached on it at the Angelus this morning, his second Sunday back at the window since his lung surgery.
It comes nine days before Americans go to the polls, and it asks what love of God looks like once it leaves the church and walks out into the world.
Some of you didn’t get last week’s Scripture reflection, on Pope Leo XIV’s first Angelus after his surgery and the coin of Caesar. You can read it here.
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“You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:39-40
The scholar of the law who tests Jesus in today’s Gospel already knows the answer to his own question. Devout Jews prayed the Shema every morning and every evening, and its command to love the Lord your God with all your heart was as familiar to that crowd as the Our Father is to us.
Jesus answers him anyway. Then he adds a second commandment the man never asked about, sets it beside the first, and says the whole law and the prophets hang on the two of them together.
Pope Leo XIV preached on this Gospel at the Angelus this morning, his second Sunday back in front of the crowds since surgery on his right lung. He begins by arguing one cannot love “on command,” he said, because our love for God is only ever an answer to a love that reached us first.
Then he turned to the neighbor. “Dear friends, we cannot truly love God unless this love overflows into love for our brothers and sisters,” he told St. Peter’s Square. “And we cannot truly love our neighbor except as children of the same Father who loved us first in his Son, Jesus.”
I keep coming back to his verb. Love for God overflows, and anything that overflows ends up somewhere other than where it started.
The first reading from Exodus shows us where it goes. God makes the command concrete for Israel. He names the immigrant, reminding his people that they were once immigrants themselves in Egypt, and then the widow and the orphan.
Then he gets oddly specific.
If you take a poor man’s cloak as collateral on a loan, you have to give it back before the sun goes down, “for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in?”
I love that question.
The God who made the stars is worried about one man shivering in the dark, and about the lender who would let him go cold over a few coins.
Love is an act that moves out. It leaves the heart and goes looking for a cloak to return. Two weeks ago, the king in this same chapter of
Matthew sent his servants out to the main roads to gather everyone they could find, and today’s readings tell us how to treat those people once they arrive.
