Gospel Reflection on Matthew 22:34-40
October 25, 2026
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sad′ducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets."
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Two weeks ago, the Calgary Flames beat the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Caroline Hurricanes, led by their young goalie, Dylan Cooley. When he was asked after the game how he made a particularly tough stop, the tall, boyish-looking goalie said with a big smile, 'I just tell myself to stop thinking and just act. I just have to stop analyzing and do what I've practiced. If the puck goes in the net, forget it. The past is dead. Move on.'
I was quite taken by his fresh outlook. What he knows about goaltending could also be applied to all of life, including our faith.
True faith involves not knowing and even not needing to know. But we made faith demanding to know and insisting that we know. This is our original sin, and we hear it described in the book of Genesis.
The desire to understand but failing to act is an ancient contradiction that goes back to our very beginnings. In the Garden of Eden, there were two trees, the tree of understanding, knowing, and and the tree of living, acting. Man was destined for the tree of living, acting, but instead he chose the tree of understanding, calculating, pondering. But this doesn't look much like a sin at all; in fact, wanting knowledge feels like a virtue. You may indeed eat of all the trees in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat: why would that be a sin? It sounds like a good thing. In fact, most of us gorge ourselves from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to decide who was good and who was bad, which choice was better.
Our knowledge, unfortunately, refined and created the very judgmental mind that Jesus warns us against. When we start off with judgments, love rarely follows. Religion is almost always corrupted when the mind, which needs to make moral judgments about everything, is the master instead of the servant. Some would tend to think this is the whole meaning of Christianity, to be able to decide who's going to heaven and who isn't. But this is much more a search for control than it is a search for truth or love or even God. It has to do with ego, which needs to pigeonhole everything to give itself the sense that I know and I am in control.
The story in this gospel should lead us to stop talking and start acting. A single act of love towards God or our neighbor is way more valuable than a whole theological conference. There's no doubt about this. To seek to obey God and be faithful to his word of much greater value than any theoretical thing we might do. Real life is made up of concrete things. Love is not an idea. It's an act. Service is not an abstract thing, but a concrete attitude, an exercise of the noblest characteristics of our being. To seek admiration for our pious words but failing to act is to waste time on one of the most useless exercises of our existence.
I think God knew that religion would take this direction. So God said, "Don't do it. Don't eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil." God was trying to protect us from our lust for certitude, an undue need for explanation, resolution, and answers. Instead, God is always revealing to us our next opportunity for doing, for obeying, for loving, for serving, for going beyond the small little cubicle in which we live. Do such acts make our lives difficult or dull? No. On the contrary, they bring fulfillment and happiness. Such acts of obedience, of doing, of stop thinking, and just do what you know you're supposed to do, represent the firm ground upon which we can stand surely amid the swamp of speculation.
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