WHAT'S THE BASE LINE?
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
October 24, 2020
I went out to dinner on Friday night with a friend. It was
the first time in many months that I had eaten indoors at a restaurant, and it
wasn’t my idea. And of course, even though I have three or four face masks in
my car, the first thing I forgot to do until I arrived at the door of the place
was to take one with me.
Not to worry. There was a person there greeting people, and
on the table in front of her was a box full of masks. And I was also
immediately requested to sanitize my hands. Both of those were requirements for
getting inside the door. That was the base line – and I was happy to comply
with it. The message was whatever else you may be here to do, whomever else you
may be here to see, if you won’t mask up and wash up, you’re not getting in
this place.
Lots of places have fundamental rules like that. At many
business offices and schools, for example, if you don’t have a valid security
clearance ID card, it doesn’t matter what else you’re here to do – you aren’t
getting in. in many online browsing sites, if you don’t have a recognized code
number, you won’t be admitted. Even when a person shows up at my front door at
home, if I don’t know you, the door will not be opened. No matter who you are
or why you’re here. That’s the base line, that’s the threshold; that’s the
condition on which everything else depends. If I get a call on my cell phone
and I don’t recognize the number, it doesn’t matter who you are or why you’re
trying to reach me, I won’t answer. (That’s what voicemail is for!)
And even religions have base lines – including our own. There
are a few things that are just fundamental to our identity and operation that,
when they are lacking, all of the rest doesn’t matter.
It’s why, for example, we Catholics are made to recite the
Creed together every time we gather for weekend worship. It’s our base line for
understanding – at a minimum – who we are and why we think we are here. It’s a
remembering of the promises that were made on the day of our Baptism.
There are lots of ways to be a good human being, but there’s
a base line for being an adequate Christian human being, and the Creed pretty
well sums it up. These are the promises our Confirmation Candidates are about
to make together with us. If we can’t even profess faith in the Trinity of God,
who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, then we are free to be people of great
virtue and goodness and dignity, but we are not free to claim the name of
Christian in doing so.
All this is to bring us back to today’s gospel, and the
question that was put before Jesus by the Pharisees:
“Teacher,” they asked, “of all of
the 613 commandments, the laws contained in the Israelite code of Moses, which
is the one that matters most? What is the one upon which everything else
depends? What’s the base line?”
And as we heard, Jesus’s response to was that there isn’t
one; there are two. They belong together because they require one another. And without
these two, it doesn’t matter how well a person keeps any of the rest of them. And
both of these two laws would have already been very familiar to anyone familiar
with the Hebrew Scriptures at the time: love God above all things, and love
your neighbor as yourself.
That’s the base line. Without these two, it doesn’t much
matter what you eat, how you pray, how generous you may think you are, or how
scrupulously you follow the rules of religion.
- Love God, and love the neighbor. Or don't presume to call yourself a Jew. That's the dual ground rule for being a part of this community.
And for us who profess to follow Jesus, our Jewish teacher
and savior, the very same is true.
Which is why any time we may presume to bring harm or hatred
upon another human being – or group – in the name of Christian religion, we can
be sure that we have lost our way. We’ve departed from the base line. And as
our first reading from Exodus reminds us today, the most evident test cases for
how we are doing in that regard are the conditions of the ones who are the very
most vulnerable and defenseless among us: unborn children, migrants, immigrants
and refugees, widows and orphans, the disabled and elderly, the homeless and
abused.
When these neighbors of ours go unattended, we’ve strayed
from the base line. There is no such thing as true love for the God of Jesus Christ
that does not require love for these. And such love requires not only prayer on
our part (although it certainly does). It requires our engagement in their
situations and in the structures that can either help them or hold them down. This
is our mission. This is our commandment from Jesus Christ. You who are about to
be Confirmed, I hope and pray and expect that you are ready to take this on as
a commitment today. We all are. We all have to. It is a privilege and often a
profound reward. But it is our necessary work.
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