The Unity of Love
Thirty-First Sunday of the Year. Fr Dominic White preaches on the two great commandments of the Law.
The great Jewish teacher Gamaliel, who was also the teacher of Saint Paul, was once asked by his disciples if he could recite the entire Jewish Law standing on one leg. So he stood on one leg, and said, ‘The Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart…’ and so on, exactly the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel. I’ve done it myself – short enough even for the less athletic among us to stay standing on one leg – so it must be true! And more seriously, it meant that all the details of the Law – food, family life and religion – were how loving God and neighbour were to be worked out in particular circumstances.
So Jesus wasn’t saying anything new. He was also revealing Himself as a devout Jew. He was quoting from the Shema, one of the most cherished passages of Scripture among the Jewish people: ‘Hear (shema), O Israel: the Lord our God is the one Lord…’ The centrality of these words of Moses from the Book of Deuteronomy were brought home to me by a Jewish Catholic lady, very happy to have been a baptised Christian for some twenty years, and very proud of being Jewish. Having come to see me to plan her funeral, she asked that the Shema be included.
As Christians, what we take from the words of Jesus is loving your neighbour as yourself – and we’ll come back to that. But it starts with the fact we often take for granted – that there is one God. Even atheists argue that ‘God’ doesn’t exist – not gods… The many gods of non-Christian religions, such as those of ancient Israel’s neighbours, can sometimes correspond to what we would call angels, and there is a supreme God who is the one real God. But where this is not the case, belief in many gods – often of dubious goodness – is often about idols. Idols are really projections of our many and often conflicting and selfish desires – victory in war, wealth, love (on my terms). It is of course right and reasonable to want justice, our needs met, and love. But we know how, because we live in a fallen world, we can want these selfishly. So there is conflict – between us, and within us. In revealing Himself to His Chosen People as the one God, the Lord, God takes the first step with humankind in putting an end to this inner and outer conflict, division and culture wars that is the daily reality of the world.
Jesus’s insistence on loving our neighbour as ourself shows the oneness of God being revealed in unity between people. We are made in the image and likeness of God, Genesis teaches us – and this is to be realised not just in each of us individually, but in the loving unity of humankind.
Of course, life experience and just looking at the news can make us rather cynical about the feasibility of such a great ideal. We can feel exhausted by the potentially infinite demands of others, and guilty that we haven’t been able to say yes to everyone, or got grumpy with people who just seem impossibly demanding. Even the particular teachings of Jesus and the Church can feel like an endless do-list. But we may not have heard Jesus properly. He said, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Do we love ourselves properly? Do we listen to our needs? It’s the opposite of self-indulgence – self-indulgence is actually what happens when we don’t listen to our real needs and therefore don’t meet them. We become divided selves. When we work on our own unity, we become better at hearing the real needs.
But more is needed here than a bit of self-help. It’s about grace. And grace is about God’s love – God’s love for us. This is the supreme love of the Great High Priest who gave himself, as the one God, once and for ever, for us. The one God who is not a lonely dictator, but the Blessed Trinity a communion of love. We are made one in the image of a God of harmony, not just selfish monads or else cogs in a vast machine in which our individuality is effaced. The Lord God, who reveals Himself in Word and in the supreme act of sacrificial love on the Cross, restores us to harmony with ourselves, with others and creation, and with God Himself.
Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6 | Hebrews 7:23-28 | Mark 12:28-34
Image: 9th century mosaic from Santa Prassede in Rome, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP
