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Love is the Greatest Commandment

¯Love, love, love … all you need is love. ¯

The multitudes of songs and poems which talk about love is endless.  As a reader, I can attest that it is also a common theme in many books, a universal concept, understood and lived out in a variety of ways.  Love really does appear to make the world go round, as someone once said.  We are a society which is consumed by various interpretations of love, the lack of love, and what we feel love should look like. 

Therefore, it should come as no surprize  that when asked: “Teacher, which commandment … is the greatest?” Jesus responds, “ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Explicit enough.  We simply need to love one another.  Over the years, I have begun to accept that maybe loving one another is part of what the first commandment is also, especially if we believe that Christ is in all of us.    

It is easy enough to love those who are like us, those who are in our inner circle – family members, close friends, even distant friends.  It is far more complex to love that annoying neighbour who insists on throwing his snow in your driveway; that homeless person who continues to steal from you and damage your property; that person on the other side of the world who lives a life contrary to what you stand for and believe in.  And yet … as Christians we believe they too are created by the Almighty, they too are created in the image of God.   How much easier it would be if we didn’t believe that.  Then we could choose whom to love. 

Maybe though, we need to separate loving and liking.  Loving is about treating others as we would like to be treated – with dignity, with respect.  Liking … that is an entirely different ball game. 

My mother was an amazing individual.  I have a brother who says it was from her – this simple, not very well educated, not particularly confident woman – that he receives his strength.  She was certainly a woman of profound wisdom.  We were a family of 9, living on the income of a federal civil servant, given my mom was, as were most women of her generation in St. John’s, NL at that time, a stay at home mom.  Yet, despite having a lower middle class income, throughout our lives  Mom always reminded us that money did nothing to define a person’s character.  That we, even from the income tax bracket within which we lived, were as good as the next one.  Gradually, what I began to realize was that if we were as good as the next one (Mom’s words), they were as good as us.  If we were not to be judged by our position on society’s ladder, nor were they.  If we were meant to be loved by our neighbour, so are they.  As St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, we need to spend less time judging, and will therefore have more time for loving for “if you judge people, you have no time to love them.”     

Knowing it, and living it, are two different matters.  Jesus calls us to live in this mantle of love, and tells us repeatedly that as we are called to live it, we are helped  by the God  who created us out of love; the God who loves us with an unconditional, never ending love.  Since God loves us all, we are all worth loving.  We do not make this decision to love, God makes it.  We are not good people worth loving because we have chosen to love God; we are good people because God has chosen to love us. 

If, as Jesus told the lawyer in today’s Gospel reading, “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,”  then our responses, and our decisions, need to be guided by loving God, and loving our neighbour – those neighbours whom we like, and even those we don’t.  Maybe we are not as succesful in achieving that because we don’t love ourselves – we don’t see ourselves as the treasure of which then Deacon Carlos Jacinto spoke of in the reflection he gave the Sunday before he was ordained. 

 It answers an age old question for me: it is far more important that we love than we be loved.  Yet, we are loved.  And with the help of the God who loves us, we will love the Creator and the neighbour He has created.   Because God “working within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” (Eph 3:20)  

~Ellen Bennett, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity Parish Grouping