30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 29th October 2017)
To love God not with a divided heart – (Matthew 22:34-40)
There is a story of a donkey who got stuck between two stacks of hay. He loved hay and wanted to eat both stacks. Because he wanted to eat both stacks he couldn’t decide where to start. Because he couldn’t decide where to start he didn’t start and so, between two stacks of hay, he starved and dropped dead. What a complete donkey! He had, as we say in the Christian business, a “divided heart,” and that did him no good at all. In this Gospel Jesus quotes the Old Testament to tell us what is the greatest commandment: it is to love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind. Not just with bits, or with a majority, but with all. It is to love simply, and not with a divided heart.
The Catholic Faith is simple: it is our simple love responding to God’s simple love for us. It is sin which complicates things, making us want to love God, but, as St. Augustine once said, “not just yet.” We love God, but we love our selfishness too. And, like the donkey, it’s not to our own good. On the cross, Christ showed that simple love for us by dying: no half measures, but simply offering us everything. By prayer and a life lived with a knowledge of the love of God for us, may we respond to him with a love which is worthy of him, and worthy of us who have been offered eternal life by his simple, undivided love for us.