Over-the-top Love

LOVE:
 – we’re wounded by love, we’re healed by love,
 – we look for love, we hide from love
 – we give our love, we withhold our love
 – we hunt for love, we run from love,
 – we celebrate love and we grieve its loss 
 – we talk about love, we write about love, we sing about love 
 – we dream of love, fantasize love, hope for love
 – we sell love, buy love, ignore love
 – we offer and receive love, we make love 
 – we need love, we promise and betray love
 – we abuse and refuse love, we forget and regret love
 – we fear love, we reject love, we welcome love, 
 – we love love…

The Greatest Three Commandments

Jesus pulls a fast one in today’s Gospel. A lawyer comes up to him with a simple question: choose from all the commandments one that is the greatest. Jesus answers the lawyer but instead of choosing one commandment he chooses two. And if we look carefully at his response we can find in one of the commandments a third commandment. Instead of coming up with one commandment that is the greatest, Jesus offers three. First, we are to love God with all of our strength. Second, we are to love our neighbor. But we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. So the third commandment is that we love ourselves. If you were to ask Jesus, then, what is the great commandment, he would offer this triple commandment of love: love of God, love of self, love of neighbor. He would suggest that this is God’s greatest revelation of how we should act. It is that upon which everything else hangs—both the law and all the prophets. So since this is so important and central a revelation, we should spend a little time reflecting upon it. We can do so by asking ourselves why does Jesus choose three commandments and what are their relationships to each other?

What Must We Do?

The heart of Christian morality is the desire to love God fully, completely, and to love others as unique reflections of God’s love. We can see an analogy in the love we must have in the love that good parents have for their children. Parents do not try to find the minimal amount of love they must have to be good parents. Parents continually give their love because they know their children need their love. Parents do not love their children because they are afraid that if they do not love their children God will punish them. Parents love their children because they are their children. Parents love their children for whom they are, expressions of love, loving them back. Parents do not love their children due to their looks, talents, or intelligence. They love them because they are their children. God loves us because we are His children.

Let’s look at several aspects of today’s Gospel:

1. The Leadership of Love
2. The Layers of Love
3. The Lavishness of Love

Clergy E-Notes

“…if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being.”

— Pope Francis

Some Laws are More Important than Others

In today’s Gospel not only does Jesus state clearly that some laws are more important than others, when a scholar of the Law asks him which is the most important commandment of the law (meaning of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible) he gives a double answer: not one but two commandments paired together to form a single most important commandment of the Law because you can’t have one without the other: love of God and love of neighbor, God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. These are not new commandments; Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus, but what is new is that he says that together they constitute the foundation not only of the other 611, but indeed of the entire Old Testament.

As Yourself

Bottom line: Love God with all you being and he will enable you to love your neighbor as yourself.

C.S. Lewis asks the question: well, how do I love myself? He observes that he might detest something he has done, but that does not cause him to stop loving himself. C.S. Lewis concludes: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

Loving God with all our Heart, Soul, and Mind, and our Neighbor as Ourselves

We pray a number of times during the day. People have their favorite morning and evening prayers. Priests and religious have prescribed prayers that we pray five times a day, composed mostly of various passages from Scripture. One of the titles we give these prayers is the Liturgy of the Hours because they are our way of keeping the various hours of the day devoted to God.

All You Need is Love

Love. What verb involves more work? What noun is more invoked? That’s the problem. The word “love” means too much and too little.
It stands for (and justifies) just about everything: strong desires, imperial needs, an obsessive ache, murder, atrocity, mendacity.

People have done things for the “love” of God that God assuredly disavows. They have done things for love of others that have crushed the very objects of their obsession. They have done things for self-love that destroyed their very souls. Thus, the appeal to love is often not only trivial, it can be lethal.

The Best Medicine for our Times

I think I have had the opportunity to preach on this Gospel reading a thousand times, at weddings, baptisms, daily mass and Sunday Mass to name a few. There is nothing more basic about being a disciple of Jesus than: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” As you have heard me say before, the whole bible can be summarized thus: 1 John 4:16 says, “God is love.” Genesis 1:26-27 states that we are made in the image and likeness of God, who is love. St. Paul therefore tells us in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 that without love we are nothing. Jesus teaches us this weekend that love is at the heart of what it means to be human and to be his disciple. And, I don’t know about you, but I feel like this is a Gospel reading that the world could reflect on now more than ever. And, I only mention it, because it is something that I also have felt the need to reflect on more and more. I think we all do.