“34 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked Jesus a question to test him. 36 ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37 Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets’” Matthew 22:34-40.
What does it mean when we’re told we should love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind? The first of the two great commandments is that we should love God more than anything else. I think the only way we know how to love God is to love what God loves; only then do we love with Divine love and allow it to flow through us. Just how does God love? We are to love things in and as themselves, to love things for what they are, not for what they do for us. That’s when we really begin to love our spouses, our children, our neighbors, and others. When we love free from our agendas, thoughts, or opinions and philosophies, then we can truly love without concern for what they do for us, or how they make us look, or what they can get us. We begin to love them in themselves and for themselves, as living images of God.
And that takes real work!
To love as Jesus loves is to mirror Jesus as the Good Shepherd leaving the ninety-nine sheep and going after the one (Luke 15:4–6). The Incarnation of Christ always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular; it refuses to let life be a mere abstraction, a formula or theology. For if God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self. We are to love in the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary, and not the other way around. The principle here is love deeply and completely in any one place. When we start with big universal ideas, at the level of concepts and -isms, we too often end up staying there — arguing about theories ad theologies and ideas and personal points of view, forever luxuriating in more distinctions. At that level, the mind is totally in charge. We think that more more clever we are the better. It’s easier to love humanity then, but not any individual people. We love in a broad sense but not i the particular sense. We defend principles of justice but can’t muster the courage to live fully just lives ourselves. We love the poor but find philosophical reasons why we cannot help them for fear of enabling them or being deceived by them.
Only by looking at things and loving things in themselves and for themselves is what it means to love God. When we love things in themselves, at that moment, we are looking out at the world with God’s eyes. When we look out from these eyes, we see that it’s not about us! And when we begin seeing the world this way, I’m sure everything starts to give us joy. Simple things start to make us happy, and life begins to offer us inherent joy.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” John 13:34.
“I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation. As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me” Psalm 40:10-11!
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” Matthew 5:43-44.
“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” Ephesians 4:26-27.
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