St Martha’s Parish, Strathfield, Memory of St Pius X, 21 August 2026
The religious authorities try to trap Jesus with a loaded question (Mt 22:34-40). “Pick your favourite commandment,” they say innocently, knowing that whichever He picks would start an argument and divide people. If He picked one of the first three commandments they would say He was too other-worldly, too focused on God and not enough on real people’s needs. But if He picked one from the second tablet of the Law, about honouring and helping each other, they’d say He was too worldly, a secular do-gooder not a genuinely religious teacher. Either way, He’d lose. It was ingenious.
Jesus outsmarts them. He responds not with rules and regs, but with love and priorities. You might say He cheated. First, rather than picking from the ten commandments, He drew from elsewhere in the Old Testament (Dt 6:5 and Lev 19:18). Secondly, He identified two commandments, from two different Old Testament books, when He’d only been asked for one. And thirdly, He cleverly knitted the two together. Love, He says, is the most important thing; love well and in the right order—God, self, neighbour—and the rest will fall into place…
St Thomas Aquinas built on this “order of charity”, asking whether we should love relatives before friends, those closest to us or those who are best? Should we love our parents or our children more? Should our own city and country always come first? Should we devote our resources on our own people or care for needy strangers? Does the order of charity endure in the afterlife? And so on.[1] Unlike the same-sex marriage campaigners who said “love is love,” all love is the same, Christians say not all loves are equal and there have to be priorities.
But what does it mean to put God first? If I’ve got a few dollars left at the end of the week, do I have to put them on the plate at Mass or can I spend them on flowers for my wife or a lotto ticket for myself? What if I’ve got a few thousands or millions of dollars over? And doesn’t God-self-neighbour elevate self too highly? Are some loves more or less worthy than others, some empty, over-sentimental or controlling?
To ask such questions is to recognise that there is a proper logic to love despite the emotional chaos in our hearts and culture. It might sound impossible to bring order into such territory. But beneath this quest lies a deeper truth: to love God first is to grasp the why of all loving, the why of everything that exists, the why of the lover, the beloved and the love between. When God’s love inspires us, we’ll love ourselves in all humility, and our fellows in all generosity. We’ll care about strangers, even enemies, not just our intimates. And loving after the pattern of God’s love, we become capable of loving more broadly and more deeply. Far from crowding out other kinds of love, loving Gods first purifies, orders and enlarges our loving.
Another feature of Jesus’ answer worth noticing is that our God-loving must be a whole-of-heart-and-soul-and-mind kind of loving. It draws the whole person, intellect and will, emotions and beliefs, and points them in the direction of active loving. Paradoxically, in giving God all our love, our heart is enlarged, so there is more room and reason to love others, and more others, and better.
Another important thing Jesus indicates in His simple but profound lesson today: that on love hangs the whole Law and the Prophets, the whole Judeo-Christian thing. Having made big and ordered loving our guiding paradigm, we must nut out the consequences for daily life. Instead of rendering the decalogue or the rest of Scripture and Tradition or moral reasoning irrelevant, the love commandment inspires, informs, interprets and applies all the rest. Every norm, every duty, every act of worship and service, is then understood according to its deepest purpose: rightly ordered love.
The Parish of St Martha is a living testament to the priority of love and the priorities within our loving. It is about hearts and souls and minds given first to God, and because of Him given generously to others. It is love patterned after the Son of God who gave up His life so that we might live forever with Him. It is a place where, amidst the Valley of Dry Bones that is our culture (Ezek 37:1-14), we might be given new heart to love with and indeed eternal life.
[1] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIa–IIae, q. 26, esp. aa. 6–9, 13.
Introduction to Mass of Friday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time (Year A)
St Martha’s Parish, Strathfield, Memory of St Pius X, 21 August 2026
Dear friends, it is a joy to celebrate Mass with you during my episcopal visitation of St Martha’s Parish. While I’m here I’ll be meeting your parish clergy and team, some of those who conserve in your various ministries, and the first communicants. I’ll visit some of the housebound or in nursing homes and our several Catholic schools. Above all, I am here to meet the ordinary parishioners of St Martha’s, and so I look forward to celebrating Mass with you today and on Sunday and to the party thereafter.
Today is the Memorial of St Pius X. Elected pope in 1903, he is best known for introducing first Holy Communion for children, for facilitating Communion to the Sick, and for encouraging all of us to receive that wonderful sacrament more often, even daily. As we look forward to hosting the 54th International Eucharistic Congress in 2028, we might ask him to pray for us and for a Eucharistic revival in our time.
