Sunday Reflection for October 25: Love of God and Neighbor as the Greatest Commandment; Reformation Sunday on a Church Always Being Made New
October 25 is the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and also Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran church. The day's readings are Exodus 22:20-26, Psalm 18, 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10, and Matthew 22:34-40. In the Gospel, the Pharisees ask Jesus which commandment in the law is the greatest. He answers that the first is, 'You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,' and the second, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' adding that 'the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.'
Bishop Edward Malesic of the Diocese of Cleveland wrote in his reflection for the day that the religious scholars of Jesus' time identified more than 600 commandments in Scripture and debated which was the greatest, while Jesus summed up the entire law in two: love of God and love of neighbor. He reminded the faithful that when they become embroiled in arguments over smaller things, they should remember what life is truly about — loving the God who created us and caring for everyone else God has made. The Exodus reading echoes the point: God gives special attention to the stranger, widows and orphans, and the poor, and asks His people to make them their neighbors too.
For Lutherans, the day is also Reformation Sunday. The October 25 edition of Faith Lens, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's youth-ministry column, titled 'Looking Back and Looking Forward,' reminds congregations that Martin Luther was a sinner as much as he was a saint, and that in recent years the church, while celebrating the Reformation, has also faced the problems in some of Luther's writings. Luther, the column notes, wanted to reform the church he grew up in, not to start a new one. The church, it says, must remember its past while looking to the future — reformation means continual renewal, not forgetting.
Source: GSM·USA
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 美国宾夕法尼亚州 Glen Rock 一间路德宗教会内景。图片：Geogast，CC BY 4.0 — via Wikimedia Commons
