“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, und...