The Shema
is the great prayer that resounds through sacred Scripture and bears
witness to the unity and transcendence of God. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord
our God is the one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I
urge on you today be written on your heart.” In the first reading Moses
uses it to instruct the people and in the Gospel reading Jesus uses it
to engage with the scribe and to point out the corollary between love of
God and love of neighbour. It was always part of the teaching of the
Law that love of God implied love of neighbour, and not just of
neighbour, but of the outsider, and sojourner. In the parable of the
Good Samaritan Jesus makes this abundantly clear. It was also always
part of the Law that it should not be simply an externally imposed set
of rules, but something that was an internal principle of correct belief
and conduct. The Ten Commandments are nothing other than a summary of
the natural law. In biblical imagery this interiority is expressed by
language of the heart. Moses says to the people “Let these words I urge
on you today be written on your heart.” Elsewhere, God says through the
prophet Ezekiel (36:26): “And I will give you a new heart, and put a new
spirit within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your
flesh, and will give you a heart of flesh.” This interior nature of the
Law will be fulfilled perfectly by the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit will create the participation in God’s
nature that is the goal of human life. The first Letter of John is the
most eloquent summary of this profound and moving theology:
No one has ever seen
God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is
brought to perfection in us. This is how we know that we remain in him
and he in us, that he has given us of his Spirit. Moreover, we have seen
and testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world.
Whoever acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him
and he in God.
There is, of course, a rather large fly
in the ointment. That is that given that we are all fallen creatures,
our hearts and minds are wounded by the effects of original sin. The
prophet Jeremiah puts it with fierce clarity: “The heart is perverse
above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?” And through the
Psalmist God says that his people wandered in the desert for forty years
with their wayward hearts. Of course, human beings are not wholly
corrupt, but we do have a tendency to fall away from God and to follow
our designs. Idolatry, then, is the great temptation of the wounded
human heart. We can make idols out of our own desires, a political
belief, money, power; in fact, virtually anything can be made into our
idol. The final word of the first letter of John is the stark warning:
“Little children: keep yourself from idols.” This was the great
trajectory of God’s leading a chosen people, to draw them away from the
idolatry that surrounded them to the knowledge and worship of the
transcendence and beauty of God.
One of the ways God did this was by
establishing a form of worship which emphasized the ineffability of the
divine life and presence. Even the very name of God could only be
pronounced once a year by the High Priest, in the dimness and silence of
the Holy of Holies. When the roman general Pompey took the city of
Jerusalem in 63 BC he went directly to the temple to look at the “god”
of the Jews. Upon entering the Holy of Holies he encountered absolutely
nothing. In a very different but related way St John of the Cross says
what we encounter at the summit of the mystical Mount Carmel is
precisely “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”
The good news of the Incarnation and the
gift of the Spirit is that all the beauty and transcendence of God are
now accessible through a sacramental encounter with Christ. The gift of
the Spirit strengthens our hearts and minds to appreciate both the
transcendence and the nearness of God, so we have the hope that we may
not be far from the kingdom of God.
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