Advent Devotion for December 10, 2019 from Apostles By-the-Sea - Episode 10

Tuesday December 10, 2019

 

Matthew 22:34-46

³⁴ When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, ³⁵ and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷ He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: ⁴² “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” ⁴³ He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,

⁴⁴ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,

“Sit at my right hand,

   until I put your enemies under your feet”’?

⁴⁵ If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” ⁴⁶ No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

 

Reflection:

In our reading today, the Pharisees ask Jesus to provide the ‘greatest commandment’. We find the same story in Mark 12, but here, Matthew adds something that Mark leaves out. Matthew says that the second commandment is “like” the first. Presented this way the two commandments are really two parts of the same whole. “Love your neighbor” is not a second commandment, but guidance for living out the first. The two are inseparable. We cannot claim that we love God if we have no love for our brothers or sisters.

This second week of Advent continues the theme of the first, which calls Christians, as they wait for Christ’s second coming, to evaluate their lives on the basis of his first coming. However short or long that wait might be, we have been given the opportunity to demonstrate our love for God and neighbor. Let us do so in abundance, with joy!