“When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law tested him by asking, ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’ (Matt 22:34-40, The Gospel for 10/26) In testing Jesus with this question, one has to wonder what answer the Pharisee was looking for. Was he trying to get Jesus to prefer one part of the law over another, so they could accuse him of denying an element of the law? Instead, Jesus gives the one answer that applies to the entire law. Obedience to any of the commandments must be for the express purpose of loving God above everything else will all that is in us. In the Gospel of John, Jesus would go on to say that to love him is to obey his commands, which dealt mostly with the love of our neighbor. This is why the second greatest commandment is like the first. To love God, to love Jesus, with all of our heart, mind, and soul, can only be shown by our love for one another. The love of God and neighbor are also the only two motives that make our obedience truly loving. Any other motives can be selfish or prideful and may actually cause our obedient actions to be sinful. To love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul is to hold nothing back for ourselves, but to hand our entire being over to him. This is actually the description that the catechism gives for what St. Paul calls the “obedience of faith.” It is that complete submission to God that is expressed in our love for our neighbor. This is the “whole law and the prophets.”
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 04:47:14 +0000
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