4 June 2020
Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
All throughout the Old Testament, humanity’s attempts at loving God, at keeping the covenant, fail. No matter how often God seeks to help, to lay out a path of life that will lead to relationship with Him, humanity fails. The Law is nearly impossible—perhaps is impossible—to live. And so one of the scribes, perhaps testing Jesus or perhaps genuinely curious, asks Jesus which of the commandments is first and most important. Jesus does not list any one of the Ten, but rather says “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 greatest and most vital commandment, far above and before all others, is to love God with your entire being. Why is this the greatest commandment?
“We love,” St. John writes, “because He first loved us,” (1 John 4:19). God created the universe, the earth, and all else for love of us, to fashion a reality in which a Creature made in His image and likeness, a creature He could have a personal relationship with, could exist. He created us in an act of love, and thus our response ought to be to love Him in return. Yet in the begin, we rejected Him; rather than loving Him, Adam and Eve chose to love themselves, to turn their heart, soul, mind, and strength toward self-service, and self-exaltation, which led to separation from God, from the source of Life itself and thus death. Likewise in the beginning we see the love between Adam and Eve, man and woman, husband and wife, break down: Adam does nothing to protect his wife and dearest friend from the deadly lies of Satan, and likewise Eve tempts Adam to follow her into sin. The aftermath of their mutual failure to care for one another becomes grim fairly quickly, as in the very next generation mankind sees its first murder. Under the reign of sin, the ability to recognize and honor the image and likeness of God inherent in each person is diminished until, during the time of Noah, mankind has become utterly blind to it, essentially to the point of self-annihilation and utter wickedness (Genesis 6:5-6).
Thus, beginning with Noah, God sought to teach mankind how to be himself again, reminding him of his created purpose and dignity. Over time God established covenants—personal relationships—with individual persons, then their descendants, then with Moses and the Hebrews a whole nation, giving the Commandments, the Law, and all else to guide them back to themselves: to loving God and loving one another, as they were always meant to from the beginning. Yet the Law was not enough, and God desired not merely to save some, but all who might desire to be saved.
So in addition to giving us instructions on how to live and how to love, He came Himself not merely to teach, but to demonstrate and then, when the Lesson was done, the Teacher departed and bestowed upon us the Power to Love as He loves: the Holy Spirit of God. By this Gift, and by Him alone, are we able to fulfill the Great Commandment to love God with our whole being, and to fulfill the second to love our neighbor. For sin has so broken us, so disposed us to self-love, that we need the Love of God to love for us, to dilute the mud of our selfishness with the fresh waters of God’s love. By this love we can be grateful for the love God has shown us, we can love even the stranger: even our enemy. God has loved us, especially in His Son, with all His Heart, His Soul, His Mind, and His Strength. Now He has poured out His love on us, that we might love Him likewise, not with a human version or equivalent of that total love, but in absolute kind. In other words by the gift of the Holy Spirit we are able to love God with the same Love with which He has loved us from eternity.
Why is it, as the scribe notes, that loving God with our whole being is more pleasing to Him than any burnt offering and sacrifice? Because in loving Him and loving our neighbor, empowered by His own love, and by loving Him with our whole being we are giving Him the one and only thing He truly desires: ourselves.