Friday, 20th Week in Ordinary Time
Daily Readings: Ruth 1:1,3-6, 14-16,22 & Mathew 22: 34 – 40
Reflection Date: August 20, 2021
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus goes to the very essence of the ethical demands of God. There were some 613 commandments in the whole Old Testament, but Jesus points to the essentials:
- love of God “with all your heart,
- with all your soul,
- with all your mind
- and with all your strength and
- love of neighbor is love of self.”
Jesus thus points out that the love of God must be total – nothing of ourselves must be subtracted from that love, and all our loves must be included in that love of God. Second, Jesus points out the inseparability of the love of God from the love of neighbor. One who truly loves God must express one’s love for God in the love of neighbor.
In exercising this twofold love, we do all that the Lord asks of us, while if we observe the commandments but do not have this twofold love, we do not do God’s will.
No other commandment is greater than these. The originality of Jesus’ answer to the question, “which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus does not lie in His answer, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” What is new is this: without being asked, Jesus pairs the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” from Leviticus 19: 18 with the first commandment, making it one with the first.
In sum, if you love God, you will love your fellow men and women; you cannot truly love God unless you also love your fellow men and women. The Gospel then highlights the superiority of this twofold love over “all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
In the moral teaching of Jesus, there is nothing more important than love, and everything that we think, say, and do should be inspired by love and be expressions of love. Without love, not even sacrifice our own bodily life will gain us anything (1 Cor. 13: 3).
When Jesus recalls the greatest commandment, he says, “you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
The important word here is not only “love” but “all.” Indeed, God will not be pleased if we say that we love God but not with all our hearts, all our soul, and all our mind. We must love God with all we have and with all we are. We should love God above all things and in all things. There should be nothing and no one who is excluded from the love of God.
All that we love, we should love only in God and only next to God.
While this is a commandment, it is not a compulsion but a grace. We can love God as God desires only if God draws us to this love. It is said that one night, St. Francis of Assisi was found crying because, as he puts it, “love is not loved.”
Let us pray for the grace to love God as God desires and deserves.
Joseph Cardozo SJ | Contributor
Radio Veritas Asia (RVA), a media platform of the Catholic Church, aims to share Christ. RVA started in 1969 as a continental Catholic radio station to serve Asian countries in their respective local language, thus earning the tag “the Voice of Asian Christianity.” Responding to the emerging context, RVA embraced media platforms to connect with the global Asian audience via its 21 language websites and various social media platforms.
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