Today’s Reflection
Gospel: Matthew 22: 34-40
August 22, 2025 | Friday

Today’s Gospel

When the Pharisees heard how Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they assembled together. One of them, a lawyer, questioned him to test him, “Teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?”

Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and the most important of the commandments. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets are founded on these two commandments.”

Today’s Reflection

Ruth’s often-quoted statement, upon Naomi’s advice to leave her after the death of her sons: “Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you! For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Ruth’s assurance to Naomi is so comforting that the Moabite woman follows her to Bethlehem. The story is an important example of love and fidelity. The care for our elderly is also being considered here and is highlighted. Another important thing is that it is a story in preparation for introducing a figure so important in history, not only of Israel as a people but also to the history of salvation. It looks into the different social statuses of women, widows, and elderly in the society of Israel. More so, the disadvantaged position of Ruth, being a foreigner (Moabite), widowed, and unprotected from without a husband to “own” her. Her loyalty to her mother-in-law is praiseworthy. The hand of God clearly works in the story’s narrative. At least, according to her, she returned empty but was “filled by the Lord” when Ruth married Boaz, and Naomi became a grandmother.

It becomes customary for us Christians to interpret the passage on the “greatest commandment” casually. This becomes automatic for us due to the different literature and our knowledge of catechesis, as taught during our “May Flower” school or summer catechesis, which is handled by the parish catechists. We often take for granted the hearers’ first reaction to Jesus’s direct and frank answer. There were many sayings or maxims at the time of Jesus and of other cultures. The Golden Rule was one of them. “Do not do unto others what you would not have done to you.” It is in the negative formulation, and it is tinged with “selfishness “because it is, consequently, what you are protecting is yourself, and you have no intention of helping others. Jesus formulated it in a positive way, and the recipient is not the self anymore but the others. Love is caring, sacrificing, and promoting the well-being of another and not oneself. The answer of Jesus knocks any pretension of the self but focuses on the positive formulation, in reverence for others and God.

/Vulnerasti, 2025