A MESSAGE FOR THE 17th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Over the past few months, the question of whether President Trump should submit to being “interviewed” by Robert Mueller and his team of lawyers has been consistently in the news. Will the President or won’t he sit down and be cross-examined by lawyers, whose agenda goes beyond accessing information only he can provide, and seeks rather to entrap him into some form of contradiction or even perjury?
We may learn from the arguments that go back and forth in this debate that lawyers, especially when they are asking questions, are not to be trusted. The reason for this is obvious—their agenda is to shed light on something they think a person is hiding, and thereby to prove their own case. The prosecutor’s role in the courtroom is to prove the defendant guilty; the defence lawyer’s task is to demonstrate (or manufacture!) the reasonable doubt sufficient to acquit him. The two legal teams can’t both be right, but with the truth hidden as it is, their path to that truth is fraught with trickery, manipulation, and frequently outright deception.
In today’s Gospel, it is a lawyer who asks our Lord what is the greatest of the commandments. It seems like a good question, and yet the Evangelist tells us that the lawyer was tempting Jesus. Apparently, this lawyer was so accustomed to his world of legal manipulation that he was incapable of asking a sincere and honest question. And yet our Lord gives him an answer, that ‘thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.’
Ironically, this answer does the exact opposite of what the lawyer intended. Instead of revealing any ignorance, or stupidity, or wickedness on the part of our Lord, it exposes the lawyer as the charlatan he is—someone who has no interest in loving God or neighbor, but a narcissist who has only his own self-importance at heart. He doesn’t love God, he doesn’t even love his neighbor—but he does love his own perceived cleverness and self-importance.
The lesson is clear: when we ask a question, let it be one whose humble purpose is simply to learn the truth!
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