Jesus states unequivocally that the greatest commandment is to love God first. The love of God involves a person's whole being. This means that we engage our intellect, our volition, our emotions, our resources and our energy. If we love God first and fully we are endeavoring to enter into our part of this covenant relationship with all our heart, mind and soul.

It is God himself who calls us into this relationship. This is the God who liberates us from the many forms of Egypt - that place of slavery for our spiritual ancestors and a symbol of the places of enthrallment in our own lives. We are the dual heirs of Moses' leadership and the saving work of Christ. We have been gifted with freedom we did not earn, even freedom from the power of sin and death. Of course we are called to love God first, and before all things. God gives us freedom and life, over and over again.

But there can be no true love of God that is not incarnate in love of neighbor. In his commentary on Exodus, Bill Fletcher notes that,

In the history of the Hebrews, God frees them from slavery and gives them Torah! They are to be a just society who would not oppress one another as they used to be oppressed by the Egyptians! …To love God is to love liberation and justice.

This is the same action as loving your neighbor. The second command is very similar to the first one. There is no other God than love! That's why faithful people must love God with all their hearts, etc.,...The Hebrew scriptures had also said, "Love your neighbor like yourself - including foreigners" (Ex.22:20). What was original in Jesus' teaching - and very revolutionary - was joining the two actions.

The straight talk in Exodus about treating aliens, widows, orphans, and poor debtors with compassion is a word about how those who love God, the great liberator, are to deal with the people around them.

William Sadlier, in his commentary on Exodus, writes,"this reading erases any doubt about how important it is to treat those in need with compassion, understanding their suffering and taking action to change what is causing it. The laws given in today's first reading are part of the covenant code God gave to Israel. They require us to hear and respond to the cries of the needy."

The cries of the needy are the cries of our neighbors. The cries of distress are not just resident aliens in a distant land two thousand years ago and far away, but people close by and commended to us by Christ.

Let me tell you part of the story of one person who listened in our time. Her name is Barbara Ehrenreich. This is how she begins her tale of discovery in 1998:

Lewis Lapham, the editor for Harper's, had taken me out for a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place to discuss future articles I might write for the magazine. I had the salmon and field greens, I think, and was pitching him some ideas having to do with pop culture when the conversation drifted to one of my familiar themes - poverty. How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered were the roughly three million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? "

Then Barbara recounts: "I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret: 'Someone ought to do the old fashioned kind of journalism - you know, go out there and try it for themselves.' I meant someone younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands. But Lapham got this crazy-looking half-smile on his face and ended life as I knew it, for long stretches at least, with the single word 'you'.

Ehrenreich knew some sobering facts going into the assignment that eventually yielded her book, Nickle and Dimed - on (not) getting by in America. In 1998 it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment and the odds of a typical welfare recipient landing a job that paid such a wage were estimated by the Preamble Center for Public Policy to be 97 to 1. At the same time, according to the Economic Policy Institute of Washington, in 1998 almost 30% of the workforce worked for $8 an hour or less.

By the end of her book Barbara had discovered the near impossibility of making ends meet with the wage levels that a third of the employed in America receive. She had encountered widespread violation of labor laws regarding overtime, the challenge of the lowest available rents still exceeding 50% of her weekly income, and the relative absence of adequate or affordable health care. Real wages have gone down for the working poor - they made less in 1998 than they did in 1973. In the first quarter of 2000, the poorest 10% were earning only 91% of what they earned almost twenty years ago.

In the last chapter of Barbara's book she writes, "Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacies of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation. But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves…"

Then Barbara closes with this sobering assessment: " the appropriate emotion is [not guilt, but] shame - shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay that she can live on - when for example, she goes hungry sothat you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor" as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for, they live in substandard housing so that the housing of others will be shiny and perfect; the endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else."

In Exodus, God says, "if you neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate." In Matthew Jesus says love God first and your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets. In Nickle and Dimed we hear waves of weeping from sea to shining sea.

How can we put the state of our society as presented in Nickle and Dimed, over against the Great Commandment from Matthew's Gospel and not cringe?

If we are compassionate toward the people of whom Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, the words of Kari Jo Verhulst, an M.Div. student at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts may voice some of the challenge we may be feeling:

I wanted my Christianity to console me, but it just increased my sensitivity to all that is wrong. Where I wanted Jesus to be warm and attentive, he was combative and single-minded; when I wanted to hear that suffering and pain could somehow be overcome, I heard that the kingdom requires that we enter into it. As Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote:

To each one of us Christ is saying, "If you want your life and mission to be fruitful like mine, do like me. Be converted into a seed that lets itself be buried. Let yourself be killed. Do not be afraid. Those who shun suffering will remain alone. No one is more alone than the selfish. But if you give your life out of love for others, as I give mine for all, you will reap a great harvest. You will have the deepest satisfactions. Do not fear death or threats. The Lord goes with you."

We are called to engage our intellect, our volition, our emotions, our resources and our energy in service to the love of God. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. We must make life more equitable and just in this society that we help to define. To do nothing is to give tacit approval. It is not enough to simply engage in the occasional act of charity. We need to change the system. We need to be willing to engage with powers and principalities - within us and around us - so that oppression and degradation might not be the daily bread of so many.

To act concretely, in love, towards our neighbors is a response to Christ's commandment. A response that honors them and the God who made us all. Let us make no peace with oppression rather let us contend against evil. O, God give us grace to see it, and the willingness to act rightly no matter the cost to us may be.