Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A · Exodus 22:20-26 · Psalm 18 · 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10 · Matthew 22:34-40

Once again someone wants to put Jesus to the test. A scholar of the law asks him which commandment in the law is the greatest. Jesus answers straight out, and from his own tradition: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.

So the rules remain, but they depend on something, and you can go back to it when they stop telling you anything. Anyone who has ever had to allocate annual leave knows what this looks like. The rule says whoever has been there longest gets first pick of the days around the public holidays. Then it turns out the new colleague, of all people, has a child whose nursery closes on exactly those days. The rule has no answer to that; it was never made for cases like this. At that point, the only thing that helps is to ask what the other person can be expected to bear.

The first reading gets more specific still. If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors, you shall not act like an extortioner toward him by demanding interest from him. If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, you shall return it to him before sunset; for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in?

The lender is entitled to the pledge, and the text leaves that alone. It only asks where the other man will sleep tonight.

At work it can look like this: someone is given notice on a Friday afternoon. The notice period has been observed, the works council consulted, everything is legally in order. Then they go home for the weekend and can't reach anyone to talk to until Monday. I know it from the other side too: an employee usually hands in their notice only once the new contract is signed. But a company rarely stands to lose its only blanket.

The reading opens with its reason, and the reason is a memory. You shall not exploit a stranger, for you were strangers yourselves in the land of Egypt. You know what that is like. And it closes with why God listens when the poor cry out to him: for I am compassionate.

And Paul? Last week he appeared here as a man who thanks the church in Thessalonica and wants nothing for it. The letter continues this Sunday, and now it sounds different. You became a model for all the believers, he writes; in every place your faith in God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. Perhaps a young community under pressure needs that kind of thing. To me it is too much, and it sounds as if he is trying to curry favour with them.

Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.

Readings: USCCB, 25 October 2026