Two Things | August 21, 2015

 August 21, 2015

The most daunting thing about being a single woman with no children is who will take care of me when I am old or ill. That’s one reason I can relate to Naomi in the first reading and why Ruth’s kindness toward her touches me in such a special way. Throughout the Bible there is a great emphasis placed on taking care of widows and orphans. Widows and orphans are at the very bottom of the social ladder and considered useless and worthless. God obviously disagrees with that notion.

Ruth was Naomi’s daughter-in-law and a Moabite. We should keep the phrase “nothing good can come from Moab (or Nazareth)” in the back of our mind so as to see the connection between Ruth and Jesus. Moabite women might be the ancient version of the Las Vegas showgirl or something along those lines. They had a very seedy reputation and Ruth was one of God’s poster children for being able to work through anyone with an open heart. Ruth came to love Naomi very much and Naomi shared her faith in God with Ruth in such an effective way that when she became widowed herself, Ruth chose to follow Naomi’s God and to take care of her. The reality of the times, however, meant that what Ruth was really choosing was to be useless and worthless as a widow for the rest of her life. She didn’t have to and could have moved back to her home in Moab and remarried and lived a fairly normal life, but her love for Naomi and God was bigger and she essentially laid down her life for another. This is why Ruth, a Moabite woman, appears in the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew. God does not conform His ways to ours but uses our sometimes-crooked lines to write the story of salvation.

Again in the gospel today, we see Jesus in a witty exchange with the Sadducees and the Pharisees. These two groups of religious leaders had been challenging Jesus on his knowledge of scripture, the law and the prophets for some time. Every attempt to stump Jesus resulted in their own shaming and they were quickly running out of dignity. The scene opens with the Pharisees tag teaming in because the Sadducees had just been silenced (shamed) yet again by Jesus. Questions were meant to test or challenge people and the Pharisees asked, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” with the expectation that Jesus would somehow change the law to his radical way of thinking, and then they would have him trapped. How foolish, right? It’s like quizzing J.K. Rowling on all things Harry Potter. She wrote the freaking book!!! And He wrote the book, so essentially, He gets to quote Himself by saying, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

When Jesus throws the second commandment in, he was doing so to trip them up, because literally every Jew knows the Great Shema from Deuteronomy 6, however, not all of them know the importance of this second commandment found in Leviticus 19:18. Jesus was demonstrating his complete knowledge of scripture while at the same time showing the Pharisees their own ignorance. I’m sure this did not go over well with them but for our own growth, it is a great reminder of how to order our lives properly.

The proper order is this: 1.  Love God with everything in your being first and most; 2.  Then you must love yourself, yes yourself (insert the Whitney Houston song here: “Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all….” After you love God first!!!); 3. Then and only then, can you love others well. We get it backwards a lot of times and feel that finding love on earth first will ignite our love for God, or finding a soul mate becomes our biggest priority.  Jesus gives us the order: love God first, and then love others as yourself. It is safe to assume that unless we fill our souls with love for God, we will never be able to pour love out to others and especially ourselves. Let’s work on getting the proper order back so that we can love well and be well.

Reading 1 RU 1:1, 3-6, 14B-16, 22

Once in the time of the judges there was a famine in the land;
so a man from Bethlehem of Judah
departed with his wife and two sons
to reside on the plateau of Moab.
Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died,
and she was left with her two sons, who married Moabite women,
one named Orpah, the other Ruth.
When they had lived there about ten years,
both Mahlon and Chilion died also,
and the woman was left with neither her two sons nor her husband.
She then made ready to go back from the plateau of Moab
because word reached her there
that the LORD had visited his people and given them food.

Orpah kissed her mother-in-law good-bye, but Ruth stayed with her.

Naomi said, “See now! 
Your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and her god.
Go back after your sister-in-law!”
But Ruth said, “Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you!
For wherever you go, I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge,
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Thus it was that Naomi returned
with the Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth,
who accompanied her back from the plateau of Moab.
They arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Responsorial Psalm PS 146:5-6AB, 6C-7, 8-9A, 9BC-10

R. (1b) Praise the Lord, my soul!
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD, his God,
Who made heaven and earth,
the sea and all that is in them.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
The LORD keeps faith forever,
secures justice for the oppressed,
gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets captives free.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
The LORD gives sight to the blind.
The LORD raises up those who were bowed down;
The LORD loves the just.
The LORD protects strangers.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
The fatherless and the widow he sustains,
but the way of the wicked he thwarts.
The LORD shall reign forever;
your God, O Zion, through all generations. Alleluia.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!

Alleluia PS 25:4B, 5A

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Teach me your paths, my God,
guide me in your truth.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel MT 22:34-40

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law, tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him,
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”