Last week, the religious leaders tried to trap Jesus with the question of whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus told them to give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is his. This week, a scholar of the law asked Jesus, whom he called a teacher, about the greatest commandment.
In reply, Jesus said, “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.”
Loving God with our whole being constitutes the first commandment. The second, loving your neighbor as yourself, remains linked to it. By linking these two commandments, Jesus shows that even love can be duplicitous. A person can claim to love God while disdaining his neighbor, although that is not love at all. Our Lord highlights a major inconsistency in the human condition by suggesting that it is impossible to love God with his whole being while at the same time not loving his neighbor.
The Epistle of John makes this point very clear. He begins by describing God as love; those who love are begotten by God and know him. But those who do not love do not know God. St. John dispels the notion that one can love God and hate his neighbor by sternly condemning such a person as a liar, for whoever cannot love the person he sees cannot love whom he cannot see.
Love therefore is the foundation of all the commandments and the Christian life. It is huge in scope, and the principle has many gradations. A spouse’s love obviously differs from a parent’s or a sibling’s, but both are love. We have a very limited understanding of love. Believing that the hallmark of love is first and foremost an emotional reaction leads to misunderstanding. Love does include emotion, but not always.
With this skewed sense of love, some people mistakenly think it is a commodity with finite capacity. From this perspective, loving our neighbor is seen as diminishing the love we might have for our spouse or children. If God is love and we, created in his image, share this divine characteristic, love can never be exhausted. The simple truth is that the more we love, the more we can love. Love has no limits.
In everyday life, and with the number of people we can consider neighbors, we are called to love them differently than we love family members. To understand, we must consider how love affects another person. In this context, it is not the syrupy love of romantic novels or movies. Rather, it is a Christian mindset and practice: wanting the “good” of another person.
Even the most objectionable of people are fully loved by God. He wants good for them (saved), even though some may reject it. Even with that possibility, He never stops loving them by constantly sending his grace. St. Paul reminds us that loving our neighbor means not rejoicing over wrongdoing but rejoicing in the truth. Because love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
By imitating how God loves, we can love our neighbor by wanting the good for them. In this way, we fulfill the mandate of loving our neighbor. We may not like them or how they behave, but we should still want what is best for them. It’s not easy, but it’s essential for a Christian.
The two greatest commandments, from which all others follow, are to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves.