It would not be Love without the other

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

The answer which our Lord gives the Pharisees seems to be a super offer or bonus - two for the price of one. They had asked Him to identify the greatest commandment from a list of 613 commandments but our Lord points to two - love of God and love of neighbour. So, which is it? Which is the greatest commandment - to love God or neighbour?

Well, our Lord had given the correct answer. The two parts of His answer are inseparable. One cannot love God without loving one’s neighbour and one cannot claim to love one’s neighbour if he fails to love God. These two parts are so intimately and intricately intertwined that the whole formula would fall apart if one part were removed from the equation. So, it is not wrong for us to call it the Great Commandment of Love - One commandment with Two parts.

Our Lord’s interrogators were certainly familiar with the first part of the commandment. It is an essential part of the morning and evening prayer which every pious Jew would pray daily and commit to memory - the Shema. It is a reminder to every Jew that the proper response to God’s grace and mercy is love, faithfulness, and obedience. Although Christians are not obliged to pray the Shema, its content should shape our priorities. Today, modern man seems to be beset by a fundamental absence of God in his life. What is being offered by modern society is a godless morality and a set of ethics, free of any religious anchoring. But without God, this man-made morality remains rudderless and without foundation. Having no direction or standard to fall back on, it ends up caving in to every popular pressure or the latest lifestyle fad.

The commandment to love must first recognise that human life will not work out if God is left out: its aspirations are nothing but contradiction. Nothing can be considered good if there is no ultimate basis for all good. Nothing can be considered true if there is no Absolute Truth which is ageless and always true, and not just true for a certain time and for a certain people. How could we possibly grow in love if there is no ultimate benchmark for love?

So, we shouldn’t just believe in some theoretical way that God exists. We cannot just relate with God at an intellectual level, though knowledge of Him is a prerequisite for our love for Him. Rather, if our relationship with God is defined by love, we must consider Him to be the most important and real thing in our life. He must penetrate every layer of our life and fill it completely: our heart must know about Him and let itself be moved by Him; our soul; the power of our will and decision; our intelligence, must be shaped by Him. He must be everywhere. And our fundamental attitude and relationship towards Him must be love.

If we lose sight of God, then all that remains as a guiding thread is nothing but our ego. We will try to grab as much as possible out of this life for ourselves. We will say that we are motivated by altruistic values or even love, but the truth is that we are in it for ourselves. We will see all the others as enemies of our happiness who threaten to take something away from us. Envy and greed will take over our lives and poison our world.

For this reason, it is critically important to remember that only if this fundamental relationship with God is right, then can all other relationships be right. Our whole lives should be driven by this motivation to practice thinking with God, feeling with God, willing with God, so that love may grow and become the keynote of our life. Only then can love of neighbour be self-evident.

Note that the second part of the great commandment is phrased in this way, “You must love your neighbour as yourself.” It does not demand any fantastic or unreal heroism. It does not say “you must deny yourself and exist only for the other; you must make less of yourself and more of the other.” These things are part of Christ’s call to His disciples to grow in holiness. But in this commandment of love, our Lord only asks us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, no more no less. People who do not love themselves will not be really able to love others. Those who do not accept themselves take exception to others. True love is fair. We can’t give what we don’t have.

Loving God is the foundation of the very possibility of loving anyone else for the simple reason that, only in the relationship with God can we feel fundamentally loved. Only in the relationship with God can we feel truly forgiven despite our fragility, and offer forgiveness to others. We can only generate love if we feel truly acknowledged in this relationship that is rooted in the deepest depths of our hearts. Many people are unable to love because they are not willing to undergo the deep experience of recognising that they are sinners and yet loved undeservedly. If someone feels unloved because he feels that he is undeserving of love, he will likewise be unable to love others whom he thinks is undeserving of his love.

Loving our neighbour, especially the poor, the weak, and the marginalised can never just be a dictate of justice. Loving others without rooting it in the love of God eventually ends in a pale surrogate of love, a distortion of true love. This is why the love that our Lord speaks of is not a mere human love. It is not philanthropy; it is not a love that can be lived through a generic commitment to social justice. This love that our Lord is talking about is a foundational love: a love that finds its source in a relationship deeper and more original to which every man and woman is called – the relationship between the creature and his maker, the relationship between a child and God his father. Only if we are anchored in this primary relationship with God can we begin to love others in a wholesome way. Without such connexion, our weak attempts at loving end up following the idols of egoism, of power, of dominion, polluting our relations with others, and following paths not of life but of death.