31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B November 3, 2024

Nov 2, 2024 | Article/Homilies

I remember as a kid my family would have some parties at the house and every so often my family would want to offer me some of their adult drink, just a sip of course. I couldn’t even swallow it, it tasted so bad. It was an acquired taste.

Heaven is an acquired taste. The law was meant to give the Jews and anticipation of heaven by being able to conform their actions.

Scribes of the law: privledged to know how to read and write interprete, teach, preserve the law. They are given insight into several ‘secrets that were the silent reason of certain laws. Primarily, they interpreted the law in light of their own traditions rather than in the light of grace of the future fulfillment that Jesus would give. There were 613 commandments that they were in charge of. However, only 1 stood our: The “Shema Isreal”. It was a commandment but also summed up the belief in the God of commandment as the God of the cosmos.

Various laws of sacrifice for sins and oblation. There is thus a scribe who comes and questions Jesus about the first of all the commandments. He is looking for first not just in the sense of chronologically but in principal. Which is the first and greatest. Jesus replies not just with the first and greatest but the one that is before all, the one that engenders all, the one that is the source of all the rest: loving God. We love him because he first loved us. The love of God inspires us and impels us to act and becomes the basis for all of man’s actions and is the source of all his hopes. The hope we want to arrive at is God’s love, the thing that inspires to act is God’s love the thing that strengthens us in the present is God’ love. How we respond to that is love in return. Man sined by turning from God’s love. Man makes up for sin by turning back to God’s love.  “Love cancels out a multitude of sins”

We are then called to extend that love to other and to love your neighbor as yourself, to love with that full love you know God has loved us. We cannot see God, but we can see our neighbor, when we love them, we love God. St. Catherine of Siena says that……

These two commandments, as Jesus says, they are not only no commandment greater, no other commandment has meaning without them.

St. Augustine would say, “Love God with your whole heart you whole mind and your whole being and your neighbor as yourself and then do as you wish” If we really do love, it will radically change the way

The 10 commandments written in stone on two tablets prefigured that Jesus on the cross would give two directions

The saints anticipated heaven here by having an acquired taste. Loving God and neighbor. We already experience a bit of the great otherness of God in others. Loving God and neightbor are tied. We prepare for heaven here and now by this acquired taste.  Love makes haven near. When we love, God is in us and we are in God. That is the fulness of heaven.

We have to get use to the love of God here on earth to fully experience and prepare for it in heaven.