Author
Liturgical Date
Readings
1.) The greatest commandment
The greatest commandment consists in the primacy of God. Putting God first, is just the remedy to the crisis of faith which afflicts Europe, which Pope Benedict speaks of so often. This crisis of faith is the gravest spiritual disease of our times.
At the same time, you can see in our society a great thirst for God that is often manifested in a desire for spiritual things, but in a very vague way, a “self-service” spirituality in which one can choose what he likes and leave what he doesn’t. In today’s Gospel, Jesus addresses the issue of the tendency inherent in the human heart to tame God, and he encourages the Pharisees, telling them that the God we must love—with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind—is not just any God. On the contrary, the Almighty Father has revealed his face to us in his Son, Jesus Christ.
Responding to the cunning Pharisees, Jesus wants to communicate something new with respect to their traditional faith. They know that the Messiah, when he comes, will be in the line of David, thus, “the Son of David”. But they don’t know that this Son of David is also the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, existing in the beginning with God before the world was. In other words, Jesus wants to reveal his divine nature. And therefore, he poses a theological question: “How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him Lord…If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son?” (Mt 22:43,45). Therefore, Jesus is the Son of David, in his human nature, but is also the David’s Lord in his divine nature. For the Pharisees, these statements are scandalous.
Pope Benedict, in one of his speeches in Germany, does not hesitate to underline this “scandalous” aspect of our faith. He says: “That the eternal God should know us and care about us, that the intangible should at a particular moment have become tangible, that he who is immortal should have suffered and died on the Cross, that we who are mortal should be given the promise of resurrection and eternal life – for people of any era, to believe all this is a bold claim” (Meeting on September 25th in Freiburg with German Catholics Engaged in the Church and in Society, Vatican website). But it is precisely this God who we must love with all our heart.
2.) Our Response
If the foundations of our faith in God, one and Triune, the faith in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, are well rooted, the question remains: how can we love God in a more complete and fervent way? It is a fact which we forget God 100 times a day. How can we shun forgetfulness (cf. RB 7:10) yet live in his presence? One of the principle instruments is prayer. Let’s make an examination of conscience together:
- How much time do we dedicate to prayer every day? Obviously, the measure of time will be different according to our own state of life: a mother of a large family cannot—and should not—spend as much time in prayer as a monk! However, despite these distinctions, we not only need the quality in our prayers, but also the quantity.
- Do we have a rule of prayer? –that is, an objective program, which we faithfully follow? If we don’t have one, we will pray only when we feel inspired to prayer, and our feelings and our inspirations are rarely trustworthy.
- When the moment of prayer arrives, what is our interior attitude?
- If we’re talking about verbal prayer, is our spirit in harmony with our voice? Or rather is our voice doing one thing while our spirit wanders elsewhere?
- If we’re talking about non-verbal, silent prayer—are we committed with the fervor of our heart? With attention? With compunction? St. John Cassian even speaks of prayer ‘burning’.
Maybe our response to these questions reveals that we don’t pray as we would like. Maybe we need an occasional tune up, as we do for our cars. It is necessary to dedicate much attention to these things, because prayer—naturally, without neglecting love of neighbor—is the most eloquent sign of the primacy of God; and it’s the proof that we have put God first, that we love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
Adjusting the compass of the spirit, so that the true North is more precisely shown to us is not impossible. On the contrary, it is doable even though it requires serious commitment. The Desert Fathers show us a way to do this:
One day Abbot Lot came to his teacher, Abbot Joseph, and said, “Father, as best as I am able, I keep my little fast, my little rule, my little prayer. But it’s not enough. And father, as best as I am able, I keep my meditation and my contemplative silence and I strive to cleanse my heart of all unnecessary desires. But it’s not enough. I still haven’t found what I seek. Father, what shall I do?” In reply, Abbot Joseph, the Elder, rose up and stretched out his hands to the heavens and his fingers became like ten burning lamps and he said “Why not be totally changed into fire?” (Detti dei Padri del Deserto, p.167)