The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (2 Cor. 4:6–15; Mt. 22:35–46)

The Lord put forward the commandment to love God and neighbor, and immediately completed it with the teaching about His own divine Sonship and Godhead. Why was this? Because true love for God and for people is possible only under the influence of faith in the divinity of Christ the Savior—the belief that He is the incarnate Son of God. Such faith awakens love for God, for how can one not love a God who loved us so greatly that He did not spare His own only-begotten Son, but gave Him up for us? This same faith brings that love to its fullness of fulfillment—to what love seeks, namely, a living union. To attain this union, one must overcome the sense of God’s justice, which punishes sin; without overcoming it, one is afraid to draw near to God. But this sense is overcome by the conviction that God’s justice has been satisfied by the death on the Cross of the Son of God, and such conviction comes from faith. Therefore faith opens the way for love toward God—that is the first point. Second: faith in the divinity of the Son of God, who for our sake became incarnate, suffered, and was buried, provides a model for love toward one’s neighbor—for love is precisely this: that the one who loves lays down his life for the beloved. Faith also provides the strength for such love. To possess this love one must become a new person—self-denying rather than self-centered. A person becomes a new creation only in Christ; and a person is in Christ when, through faith and grace-given rebirth through the holy sacraments received in faith, he is united to Christ. From this it follows that those who hope to maintain even a moral order without faith are waiting in vain. Everything goes together; a person cannot be divided. All of him must be satisfied.