Who sits on the throne of your heart? In this Homily Short for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Fr. Chas Canoy reflects on Jesus’ greatest commandments in Matthew 22:34–40, challenging us to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind while loving our neighbors as ourselves. Discover how placing God first transforms our relationships and strengthens our faith.
Watch the Homily Short
Listen to Homily Short
Read Homily Short
Jesus is being challenged by these strange bedfellows. On one hand the Pharisees, on the other the Sadducees. This Sunday we hear that line of questioning culminate to the one question we heard today.
Rabbi, which commandment of the law is the greatest? And Jesus responds not with one, but two of the greatest commandments. You shall love the Lord your God with all your, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Your heart is symbolic of your will.
What is your deepest heartfelt desire? Is it God? Do you love your spouse or your children more than God himself, whom you are called to be with for all eternity? Who is it that sits on the throne of your heart? If it’s someone other than God, whether it’s you or another person, that person is an idol that has become your God. Number two, what does it mean to love God with all your soul? And so the soul is symbolic of your life in its entirety, our entire being. We are to love God with all that we are.
Why is loving God with all that we are an important distinction? If God becomes just one of our loves among many, then God becomes a competitor for our loyalty and a competitor for our time. If God is just one of those loves, then he is not God at all for us. And because God is the source of love and love itself, we in fact can love all the other people in our life with a far deeper love than if God was not all in all in our life.
So his grace in our life is real power. Number three, what does it mean to love God with all our mind? So this means loving God with our intellect. And the intellect is our cognitive power to know and understand the truth of things.
When we don’t love God with all our mind, we refuse to recognize what is true or false or what is right and wrong as God intended. Then Jesus didn’t stop at the first and greatest commandment. He also gave us the second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
If you say you love God, then you also need to love the people that God loves and for whom Jesus laid down his life. We can’t say we love God if we despise or neglect the very people he holds dear. And so without these concrete commandments, we may be loving not the God who has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ, but instead love a God of our own making in which we fashion God into our image instead of allowing God to fashion us in his.
We need a society that once again embraces the love of God and the love of neighbor as foundational. And in conclusion, to end on a positive note, know the real enemy. The real enemy is the one who foments all of this hatred and division among the humanity that God so loves.
And that’s why we pray the prayer of St. Michael the Archangel after each and every Mass, knowing the real enemy. God bless you.