Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?
A30 | 29 OCTOBER 2023 | MATT 22:14-22
“Love” has been cited in defence of mendacity, atrocity and even murder. It has been used to justify just about everything and anything and it is undeniable that things have been done for “love” of God that God must surely abhor and for “love” of others that have crushed the object of “love”. The appeal to “love”, when it hasn’t been trivial, has often been lethal. And, yet, in today’s gospel Jesus unequivocally asserts that “the whole of the law, and the prophets also” depends on love: love of God and love of neighbour. All else, he implies, is commentary.
He was responding to yet another hostile question – “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” – aimed at trapping him. It was no idle question, having already generated heated debate among Jesus’ contemporaries, and for obvious reasons. The Law had 613 commandments, 365 prohibitions and 248 injunctions. Given the plethora of different answers possible, it was easy to get this taxing question wrong and, in the situation in which Jesus found himself in Jerusalem, the stakes could not have been higher. Despite the legalistic tone struck by the Pharisees, this question was far from academic. The Law enshrined Israel’s deepest, defining identity as God’s chosen people.
On one level, what Jesus said in reply was far from original. The first part of his response came from a prayer in the Book of Deuteronomy known then and now as the Shema, which many Jews still devoutly recite every morning and night. The command to love God absolutely was to be written on the heart and drilled into the memory of every Jewish child, as Jesus’s own mother doubtlessly did for him. The second part of his answer is lifted from the Book of Leviticus, echoing the sentiments in the first reading from Exodus about how to treat strangers in your midst: you must love them as yourself.
But what was original in his answer would have certainly raised eyebrows, as well as heckles: by saying that the whole Law hangs on love of God and love of neighbour, he implies that these two commandments, though enumerated as first and second, are nevertheless on an equal footing. He seems to suggest that love of God and love of neighbour are so inextricably bound together as the foundations of the Law as to be, practically speaking, the same thing. To bind yourself to your neighbour is to bind yourself to God; and, conversely, to blind yourself to your neighbour is to blind yourself to God.
His answer to their leading question, then, was that the whole of life and its ultimate purpose life is founded on loving God with our whole being and loving our neighbour as “another self” (Aristotle’s definition of “friend”). But given that no word has been made to do more work or used to mean so many diverse things than the word “love”, it is reasonable to ask what Jesus means by “love”.
If the word “love” in popular culture is often short on specifics, there’s nothing at all amorphous about it in the context of the gospels. The love of God engages our whole selves – head, heart and hand – in faithful and persevering adherence to the good, to Goodness Itself, in other words, which is God. As for love of neighbour, Jesus undoubtedly had in mind exactly what is described in today’s first reading from Exodus about putting the good of others first, before every other consideration, by helping all who need help, especially with the necessities of life, and even seeking the good of those who wish us harm – our “enemies”, that is. And, specifically, in the context of Israel’s early history, by treating the stranger and those who are, for whatever reason, unlike ourselves, with respect and fairness. What could be more specific and less sentimental?
Doubtless St Paul, the learned Jew, had this specification of love in mind when he lyricises in his familiar passage to the Corinthians, saying, again unequivocally, that genuine love is always patient and kind, never jealous or resentful or conceited or rude or selfish; endlessly respectful and generous; and all-forgiving, all-trusting, ever excusing, and enduring “even to the edge of doom”, as Shakespeare has it.
The fact that we’re told specifically to love our neighbour “as ourselves”, implies, however, that we cannot love our neighbour unless we love ourselves. But how do we love ourselves without falling into complacency? We frequently hear that we are to “accept ourselves”: but if you find everything about yourself acceptable, you may need to trade off some self-acceptance for some self-awareness. Loving ourselves means the very opposite of self-indulgence, self-absorption, self-promotion, self-praise, self-satisfaction or self-importance: very different, then, from the deliverances of much popular self-help psychology.
Genuine love of self cannot be rooted in anything less than the deepest of all truths, namely, that God’s love alone accounts for my existence. Love of self, in other words, is not rooted in who I am or what I’m like but in that I am. And that means, somewhat paradoxically, that you’re loveable not because God loves you, but rather, God loves you because you’re loveable. You are, after all, God’s creation; and all that he has created is, by definition and origin, good, even if we do much that conceals that innate goodness.
We can only genuinely love what is good, just as we can only genuinely know what is true: the will and the intellect are innately inclined to goodness and truth. God is goodness itself and so to love the good is to love God. When we love the good that is another person, it is God’s love that is made real in time and space; and we ourselves become living sacraments of God’s love. Love is the eternal in us, which is why only love will last for all eternity.
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