To Love With All You Have – The Greatest Commandment
One day, a scribe went to Jesus with the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Indeed on this single statement, this single response from Jesus, hangs the whole of Christianity. It all starts with loving God above all else with our whole heart, our whole mind, all our strength and our whole soul. By this reply, Jesus is telling us that first and foremost, we are called to be lovers, and not lovers in the worldly sense but in the true sense, the true meaning of love. In our humanness, it is impossible to truly love someone and be in an intimate relationship with another. In an intimate type of love, you either love one or the other, or you’re fooling both!
Jesus starts his reply by stating, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone!” In other words, there is no other god besides Him! Put another way, you shall have no other God but the Lord! The first part of the reply given by Jesus is recorded in Exodus 20, where in verse 5, God says, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God!” Does he mean jealous like how we humans get jealous?
In Jesus’ response, he tells us what our relationship with God is meant to be – we were meant to be lovers, loving God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls, all our strength. The songwriter wrote:
When a man loves a woman He can do no wrong He can never own some other girl Yes when a man loves a woman I know exactly how he feels ‘Cause baby, baby, baby, you’re my world
Doesn’t that sound like the relationship we aught to have with God? Let’s re-write it a bit
When a man loves the Lord He can do no wrong He can never own some other god Yes when a man loves the Lord I know exactly how he feels ‘Cause Lord, Lord, Lord, you’re my world.
When we love someone, we never want to hurt them; we are always trying to do things to please them and make them happy. We are always thinking about them and we constantly long to be in their presence, and anytime spent apart is too long; isn’t that true? This is how our love for God is meant to be – our heart’s desire should be to avoid sin because it hurts God. Our heart’s desire should always be to please him by the way we live, by our words, by what we do, by our whole lives.
Why should we love God? The Catholic Catechism number 358 tells us that “God created everything for man, but man in turn was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to him.” St Augustine had a famous quote which said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee..” We were made to love God. That is our primary purpose. It is why we were created. Outside of this we will be miserable! Secondly, when you come to know God and who he is and what he’s done, you cannot help but to love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. Like a river cannot help but flow downstream, you cannot help but love God. The beauty and the power in truly loving God is that when you do, the second part of his response becomes obvious – that is “you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It becomes obvious because just as in human love, what is in the heart your beloved is important to you, so too when you grow to truly love God, you will come to know, and to desire what is in his heart – that we should love one another as he has loved us.
Is loving God always easy? It is not always easy. Like the trout that has to swim upstream to lay her eggs, many, many times, you will have to swim upstream, going against the norms of the world to live in your love for God. It may not be easy all the time but… it is definitely worth it for is comes with the inheritance of eternal life, whereas living your life outside of good relations with God brings eternal damnation.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, number 1033 tells us, “We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren.[611] To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self- exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”
Sisters, brothers, it is only when we enter into a true love relationship with God that our lives will be changed and the world around us will be transformed. God has already proven his love for us by giving us all that he had, His Only Son Jesus Christ to pay the price for us and be the Priest and Victim, the perfect, spotless Lamb of God who took our place so that we might go free. The greatest commandment is enjoined in us and we fail to live out what is natural when we choose to live in sin. In a true spirit of repentance, let us repent of our sinfulness; let us renounce everything that we have placed ahead of our God and return to our true love, our First Love.
Heavenly Father, please pour your grace into our hearts that we may have a fervent desire to enter into and stay in that love relationship that you have called us to. Give each of us the grace to truly love you with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength, and in loving you, teach us to love ourselves recognizing that we are your work of art, and then teach us to love those around us the way you love us. In Jesus’ Name we pray. AMEN!
