Lord's Day Reflection: The love commandment

By Fr. Edmund Power, OSB

It’s curious that such an essential and focused declaration of Jesus, and one that sums up in few words the heart of the Jewish Law and of the Christian endeavour, should emerge from a context of cunning, scepticism and hostile motivation.

Today’s Gospel tells us that the Pharisees’ spokesman sought to test him. The verb used in the Greek original of Matthew’s Gospel is found also at the temptation of Jesus in the desert at the start of his ministry (Mt 4:1ff) where the devil is called the tempter.

Testing someone can make them better; but it can also be intent on rubbishing a person. Maybe there’s a message for us in those three words, to test him: when we criticize people, avoid the unkind gratification of proving them wrong and embrace the generous satisfaction of helping them improve.

As in the desert, Jesus quotes the Scriptures, in the present context using apposite verses from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.  Should we read a special significance in the threefold heart, soul and mind, or are we simply witnessing a rhetorical amplification?

In any case, there is the emphasis on the totality of the love, indicated by the thrice-repeated word all. Love of God admits of no compromise, no prudent reduction, no partialness.

The love referred to is, of course, “agape”, the gift-love so prominent in the New Testament and so characteristic of the Christian ideal. Is it really possible to love God in that way?

There is another love in the Greek tradition, “eros”, need-love or desire. This word is never used in the New Testament but, as Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est reminds us, “God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape” (§ 9). God plants the need-love in our hearts and it drives us to seek his face.

The lawyer’s phrase, the great commandment in the law, implies that there is only one, but Jesus broadens the matter, drawing in two other objects of love: your neighbour and yourself. We can remember the blunt words of John: if anyone says, “I love God” and hates his brother, he is a liar (1 Jn 4:20).

True love of God necessarily impels us to love as he loves, and that means our neighbour, but not merely our next-door neighbour, but all neighbours.

The first reading this Sunday describes the wide sweep of such love, reaching out to foreigners, to those who have lost their anchor relationships and to the poor and weak who lack economic clout.

But we must not forget the little phrase as yourself. The implication is that right self-love, as opposed to wrong self-love, is the measure.

So many problems, so many exaggerations, are occasioned by a lack of self-esteem, by not being satisfied with our God-given and God-loved reality. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to be better, but it does require us to value what we’ve got, and therefore to value our neighbours for who they are.

So, love God, and treat yourself and others with deep respect!