I Am Because We Are

October 29, 2023

Today’s passage is another example of the kinds of questions the Jewish establishment, through the Scribes, Pharisees, and others, kept asking Jesus in order, as Mathew puts it, to test him.  It is quite likely that all these were not asked one after the other, but in Mathew’s editing of the story of Jesus, he tends to put together events and teachings that may have taken place at different times, but which have a similar theme.  Thus, in an earlier part of his Gospel we have many of Jesus’ teachings put together in what is traditionally called Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 to 7).  Then we have had various parables (which we have heard for a number of Sunday) that take up the theme of the rejection of the Jews and the opening up of God’s message to all, and not just to the chosen people.  Next we we have a series of these kinds of questions that are asked by these custodians of the law, and in Jesus’ answers Mathew gives us an insight into Jesus’ own nuanced understanding of the Jewish scriptures, and his ability to slip out of their ‘traps’.

So what could be the ‘test’ that the self-proclaimed Jewish custodians of the law had prepared for Jesus when they asked: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  To understand the test, we need to understand context.  In Mathew’s Gospel, we will find that before these ‘test’ questions, there were many incidents recounted in which Jesus not only spoke out against the burden of the Jewish law imposed on people by the religious heads, but actually went ahead and broke the law in front of them. We find the same thing happening today.  For instance, Pope Francis too has been accused of a similar breaking with Catholic immutable tradition, as he calls into his church homosexuals, divorced people etc., because there is a certain group of Catholics who find all this terribly objectionable, like the Pharisees were scandalised when Jesus sat down to eat with prostitutes and tax collectors. And today too, the self appointed custodians of the faith in the shape of five Cardinals try to ‘test’ his orthodoxy, when they submitted to him in July 2023 some DUBIA (doubts) asking for clarification regarding whether it was valid to reinterpret divine revelation according to today’s newer contexts, whether blessings could be offered to same sex relationships, whether women’s ordination could be considered, and on whether synodality itself had any constitutional value in the Church. And like the Pharisees and Scribes, these Cardinals too were not happy with Francis’ nuanced replies, but wanted clear YES or NO answers.  

For the Jews and all those in any religion for whom nothing can come above the letter of the scriptures, it was a scandal that Jesus repeatedly broke the fourth of the well-known Ten  Commandments, i.e. the Sabbath law, that even today is practised with great care in Israel, so much so that even during the current Israel Palestinian war, Jewish rabbis are deeply engaged in what I call ‘theological calisthenics’ to find ways to justify the ‘breaking’ of the Sabbath law, since in order to defend Israel, the soldiers have to ‘work’ on the Sabbath too.   

So the question was probably meant to force Jesus to pick and choose between the commandments, and then accuse him of blasphemy for having the temerity to overrule Moses himself, by creating a hierarchy among the different commandments, or even discarding one of the commandments. But Jesus answers in a manner that summarises the first four commandments (the ‘vertical’ commandments as it were as they referred to how human beings should engage with God directly) by saying: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind”. And then he adds the second, which is: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” which includes all the remaining six ‘horizontal’ commandments as it were, i.e. commandments that deal with how human beings should engage with other human beings.  So he doesn’t pick and choose, but by his careful wording,  chooses all ten. But what is interesting to note is that though Jesus was only asked which ONE was the greatest commandment, he chooses to give TWO, indicating that fulfilling any one by itself is not sufficient enough. And though Jesus was referring only to the Jewish Scriptures (the parts included in what we call the Old Testament today), I believe we too can see in this answer of Jesus a summary of all of his teachings, and the entirety of what being truly religious is all about.

And lest we forget how demanding the fulfillment of the second part of this teaching of Jesus is, we have the first reading of today reminding us of some aspects of what this law entails.  It tells us of our responsibilities towards the newcomer, towards orphans and widows and the like. But I was particularly taken up by the last example:  ”If you lend money to the poor of my people who live among you, you shall not coerce them like a collector, nor oppress them with usury. If you take a garment from your neighbor as a pledge, you shall return it to him again before the setting of the sun. For it is all that he has to cover himself, to clothe his body; nor does he have anything else in which to sleep. If he cries out to me, I will hear him, because I am compassionate.”  

This is powerful stuff especially in our capitalistic world today.  In other words, even if someone owes you something and you have a right to take from that person some surety (e.g. that person’s land) to guarantee that the loan will be repaid, even in such a case, the teaching is that you must return even that ‘surety’ to that person if it is necessary for his/her survival. And furthermore, that even loans, when given, must not be given at usurious (exorbitant) rates of interest.  

This, of course, is based on a principle found in various parts of the Old Testament, and has much to challenge us in today’s world where countries and individuals are caught up in debt traps. A debt trap is where an individual or a country is forced to take out new loans to repay existing loans, and so gets sucked into a vicious whirlpool out of which they can never get out.  At a local level, many of us, for instance, are aware that in today’s world, moneylenders and even banks, take over the lands or houses or even ‘ownership’ (the bonded labour system in India for example) of people who have taken loans, - people who are so poor that they spend all their earnings paying off the interest on the first loan, and finally default even on that, and so never ever can even dream of getting to the point where the original loan is ever lessened, much less paid off. When Pope Francis today speaks about the dangers of unbridled capitalism, he is talking about the same thing.  He is talking from his own experience of the terrible suffering he himself saw when Argentina (his home country) defaulted on its debts in 2001-2002. As a result he saw that around half the population of the country were driven into poverty and many people lost their life savings as banks failed.  

On the other hand, while the lending institutions extract their pound of flesh from such persons, billions are ‘written off’ as bad loans of the ‘rich’. In India for instance, a total amount of debts worth over 130 million USD (INR 10.83 lakh crores) that were due by companies and high value individuals were written off over a period of 8 years (2013-2021), and this kind of thing has happened under past governments too.  Another news item indicates that in the USA, Wall Street's top 4 banks wrote off $3.4 billion as bad loans in the first 3 months of 2023, because borrowers (obviously high value individuals and companies) couldn't keep up their repayment schedules, even as foreclosures (confiscating of houses) of those who cannot pay off their home loans continues unabated.  Many justify these things by a reference to economic laws which they feel are not to be confused with religious laws, for business and religion are seen as occupying different worlds. But are they different worlds? - for aren’t they inextricably linked, since every act we do in that ‘business’ world contributes to how our entire world functions, and also what kind of person we ourselves become.  As Aristotle taught: We become what we do.

 

Certainly, like Jesus, the Old Testament did not see these worlds as different. For it may be educative to note,  that this ‘debt trap’ into which the poor are sucked, is not a new phenomenon, and accordingly such situations were specifically provided for in Jewish law. According to the Book of Leviticus (chapter 25), the Law of the Jubilee commanded that at the end of every 50 years, all slaves and prisoners had to be freed, all  debts had to be forgiven, and all land taken in exchange for unpaid debts had to be restored to the original owners.  In our own times, in preparation for the crossover into the new millennium, a huge Jubilee 2000 campaign was initiated and supported by a large number of individuals and NGOs asking that the debts of the LDCs (least developed countries) which were completely entrapped in debt should be cancelled unilaterally - a campaign that received strong opposition from many rich countries, but yet succeeded to some degree.

It is precisely this kind of ‘system’, where the poor face economic ruin, that the first reading strongly condemns.  In one of his many exhortations about the dangers of the present economic order that is prevalent in our world, Pope Francis says: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape".  

While all of us may have different positions with regard to the different economic orders propounded in our world today, whether it is capitalism, communism, marxism, socialism, or whatever other ‘ism’ we favour, the only criterion to judge their value,then, according to Jesus at least, is whether it ends up in a genuine love of neighbour, and especially of the poor and disadvantaged neighbour, for on this hangs the entire peace and hope for the human race. 

 

Why do I say that?  Let me share a well-known  African UBUNTU story that has always touched me: "An American anthropologist proposed a game to the children of a Xhosa tribe of Bantu ethnic people in South Africa. He put a basket of sweets near a tree and told them that whoever ran there first, would win the sweets. When he gave them the signal to run, the African kids took each other’s hands and ran together. They then sat in a circle enjoying their treat. The anthropologist asked them why they chose to run as a group when they could have had more sweets individually. One child spoke up and said, “Ubuntu. How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?” Ubuntu in African philosophy means, “I am because of who we all are.” (as recounted by journalist Mark Manuel).  

This was, according to me, the essence of Jesus' insight, namely that we are all inextricably linked, and God too is part of that link - so that any break that any of us causes in this circle  through lack of love (whether in the business, or religious or familial or any other world we inhabit), whether it be small or big, is a break in this entire circle that connects us to God and to each other.  And so in a sense Jesus is telling all of us who claim to be religious:  If you break that circle, you are in peril of breaking with God, whatever our adherence to religious or other laws.

1st Reading – Exodus 22:20-26

Thus says the LORD: “You shall not harass the newcomer, nor shall you afflict him. For you yourselves were once newcomers in the land of Egypt. You shall not harm a widow or an orphan. If you hurt them, they will cry out to me, and I will hear their cry. And my fury will be enraged, and I will strike you down with the sword. And your wives will become widows, and your sons will become orphans. If you lend money to the poor of my people who live among you, you shall not coerce them like a collector, nor oppress them with usury. If you take a garment from your neighbor as a pledge, you shall return it to him again before the setting of the sun. For it is all that he has to cover himself, to clothe his body; nor does he have anything else in which to sleep. If he cries out to me, I will hear him, because I am compassionate.

2nd Reading – 1 Thessalonians 1:5C-10

Brothers and sisters: You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth not only in Macedonia and in Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. For they themselves openly declare about us what sort of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to await his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.

Gospel – Matthew 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.”