Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Asked which commandment matters most, Jesus does not pick from a long list. He names two: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else, he says, hangs on those two, the way a coat hangs on two hooks rather than a hundred small ones scattered everywhere.

Exodus gives the sharpest test of the second commandment, aimed specifically at people with no power to demand anything: the widow, the orphan, the stranger. If they cry out, God says, I will surely hear them. Exodus names the widow specifically, and so many people your age know that particular chapter of life firsthand, either having lived it themselves or having watched a spouse, a sibling, a friend live it.

Everything this month has asked, about the harvest, the barns, what was entrusted, what remains unsettled, comes back to these same two hooks. If anything you have carried across a long life has come loose from both love of God and real love of the people around you, tonight is a fair night to notice that honestly rather than defend it as simply the way things turned out.