“Show us your credentials part five." Some thoughts for the readings for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - The Greatest Commandment

Our reading from Deuteronomy about Moses’s death on Mount Nebo offers us a delightful image of the intimate relationship between God and Moses, and through Moses to the people of God. God takes Moses’s body and buries him—a level of care usually reserved for closest loved ones. While that intimacy was once held by Moses on behalf of the nation, today we are invited into that same closeness as God’s community, knowing we are deeply loved and held in the hardest times.

Our gospel reading from Matthew is so familiar might even miss the point. Jesus is still in the temple. Jewish leaders and the Judaean wealthy elite are still trying to undermine his standing. They have one more play.

Jesus was not the first rabbi to offer this “new” way of understanding Torah. But it was innovative and is central to his teaching. By bringing together Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, he makes them equally important and the basis for reading the whole of Torah (Law).

Many people, then and now, understand them as separate commands. Loving the Lord their God is done through obedience or going to church. Loving our neighbour is then a separate requirement. Jesus, along with some rabbis before him, binds them together, teaching that loving our neighbour is actually how we love God. . Throughout his life and the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shows that the law is meant show how to respond to that care shown Moses and God’s people by being shaped as a people of compassion and mercy for all,  fulfilling God's covenantal mission to restore humanity and renew creation. This sits at the very heart of following Jesus and to be God’s church.

The Good Samaritan story in Luke expands on this by asking: who is my neighbour? This was not the expected response. Many of us still struggle with this. Are immigrants, Māori, refugees, or other marginalized groups really our neighbours? The answer is a resounding yes. We love God by loving them as ourselves.

The repetition of the words in our weekly liturgy, nearly all of which come from scripture, are designed to shape us into a community with this at the centre of our life and concern . As we face uncertainty on multiple fronts, we are invited to make this our focus, to be a people that loves God by loving all our neighbours. And maybe like Francis of Assisi, when we do this, we will meet the crucified and risen Christ in “the leper”.

This message of love was incredibly subversive. The word "gospel" was originally a Roman imperial term used for an emperor's military victories. Applying it to a crucified criminal and his way of love turned everything upside down. True good news is found in loving God through our neighbour, not through military violence or colonization. It leaves us with an important question: how might all of this inform the way we cast our votes in this year's election?

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