Friday, 20^th week in ordinary time – Memorial of St Pius X – Matthew 22:34-40

Think about this for a second. On Wednesday, we’re cruising through chapter twenty of Matthew’s Gospel. It’s a gentle flow. Then we hit Friday, we turn one single page, and suddenly we are staring down chapter twenty-two!

It’s like a peaceful mountain brook instantly turned into a rushing, roaring, category-five river. In the span of a page, Jesus predicts His death, heals the blind, rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, clears out the temple, curses a fig tree, and drops three massive parables of judgment on the religious elite. Just like that, the environment changes.

And now, we step into chapter twenty-two. The temple isn’t just a building anymore; it has become an intellectual battleground. The religious establishment is coming for Him. They aren’t trying to learn; they are trying to trap Him. They want an error. They want a reason to put handcuffs on the Son of God.

First up come the Pharisees. They bring a political trap about taxes. Jesus answers, exposes their hypocrisy, and leaves them completely amazed. They walk away to lick their wounds. Next come the Sadducees. They who don’t even believe in the resurrection, cook up this bizarre, hypothetical, sci-fi storyline about marriage in the afterlife just to trip Him up. And what does Jesus do? He silences them too.

Now we enter Round Two. The Pharisees see the Sadducees get dropped, so they change their formation. They send in their specialist. The text calls him a “lawyer.” But hold on! Don’t picture a modern-day defence attorney in a sharp suit. This lawyer was a scribe. He was an expert in the Torah. And he asks a question that reveals the absolute obsession of the religious culture of that day: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

The Problem is that these religious leaders had a body but with no soul. The Pharisees had codified 613 different laws. They were so obsessed with the minute, scrupulous, microscopic practice of the rules that they completely missed the point of the rules. They had turned the law into a cold, dead body with absolutely no soul.

They wanted a contract. But God wanted a covenant. A contract is about performance. A covenant is about relationship. A contract says, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” A contract says, “I will do the bare minimum required of me so I don’t get penalized.” But Jesus stands up in the middle of that intellectual cage match, and He puts the heart back into the law. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

That is the vertical dimension. It’s total commitment. It’s covenantal fidelity. It’s loving God even when it hurts, even when it isn’t mandated, even when it costs you everything! But Jesus didn’t stop there. He hooks a horizontal dimension onto it. He grabs Leviticus 19:18 and pulls it into the light: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

For the rabbis, the world hung on the Torah till it resembled a stand of hair that held the weight of a mountain; more law, less love. But Jesus looked at them and said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

That brings us to the memorial of our patron, St Pius X. Think about the time Pius X was stepped into the papacy at the start of the 20th century. The church was facing “Modernism,” an intellectual battleground of its own. It was a world that wanted to analyse God, dissect faith, and turn religion into a checklist or a political statement.

And what was the personal motto of St. Pius X? “Instaurare omnia in Christo” — To restore all things in Christ. How do you restore all things in Christ? You do exactly what Jesus did in Matthew 22. You put the heart back into the faith! You move from the cold contract of intellectualism into the burning covenant of divine love!

Poe Pius X saw people treating the Holy Eucharist like it was a distant, terrifying, legalistic ritual. People felt they weren’t “worthy” enough, so they rarely received communion. But Pius X had the heart of a shepherd. He lowered the age for children to receive the Eucharist, and he encouraged daily communion.

Why? Because he knew you cannot fight the battles of a secular world on an empty stomach! He knew the Eucharist isn’t a reward for the perfect; it is food for the hungry! He was bringing the vertical love of God straight down into the horizontal reality of everyday people! He was taking the law, and he was breathing the soul back into it!

If you only live out the vertical dimension, if you say, “It’s just about me and God, I’m just focusing on heaven,” you know what you look like? You look like a lone pole sticking straight up out of the ground. It’s pointing upward, but it’s isolated. It’s directionless to the world around it. It’s rigid. It’s lonely.

But when you take that vertical pole of loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and you crash it together with the horizontal beam of loving your neighbour, loving the broken, and feeding the spiritually hungry…something happens. When the vertical meets the horizontal, the Cross of Jesus Christ appears. The Cross isn’t just an ornament we wear around our necks. The Cross is a collision! It is the ultimate intersection where total devotion to God meets radical love for people.

On this memorial of St. Pius X I ask you, Are you living in a contract, or are you living in a covenant? Are you just checking the boxes of religion, or are you restoring all things in Christ? Stop trying to survive on “more law.” It’s time for more love. Love God with everything you’ve got, and let that love spill over into how you treat the person sitting next to you, the coworker who gets on your nerves, and the neighbour who doesn’t deserve it.

Let the vertical meet the horizontal. Let the world see the Cross active in your life today!