15th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Corinthians 4:6-15 Matt 22:35-46
Love God and Love your neighbor. Jesus tells us that on these two commandments hang the entire law and prophets. Christian tradition considers love to be the greatest of the three theological virtues. And our Ukrainian Catholic Catechism tells us that love is the Substance of the Christian Life.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul describes this love. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”.
Our Catechism says:
The most important virtue, born of faith, is the virtue of divine love, which is granted by God to the Christian as a new creation in Christ. The Evangelist John emphasizes that love is the essence of life in God: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” .
The virtue of love is not only the human capacity to love; it is the love by which God himself lives. This is why such love as the apostle Paul teaches is greater than all the other marks of the divine life in humankind, that is, greater than the other virtues. It is God’s greatest gift to us, which we have received in the Holy Spirit: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us”
Love has as its source God: it is the Love of the Father revealed in the Son and granted to us in the Holy Spirit (see Rom 8). Anyone who participates in this kind of Love becomes capable, in the Holy Spirit, of loving the Father as the Son loves him. They can also love their neighbor to the very end, for “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” .
The Venerable Metropolitan Andrey teaches: “Without love everything in the soul is dead, [for in such a soul] the will is not primarily directed towards true goodness, which is the highest good and simultaneously the ultimate truth, that is, the Almighty God.”
In and through God, the believer who has received the gift of divine love loves others and all of creation. Therefore, love of neighbor is an expression of love for God: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also”.
The divine love by which the Christian loves their neighbor, is selfless and sacrificial. “It does not insist on its own way”. This love manifests itself in the capacity to love even one’s enemies. It is precisely in this kind of love that a Christian reveals the face of the loving God who saves sinners through his love, and reconciles them to himself, transforming them into believers justified in Christ.
The substance and motivation for all of a Christian’s moral actions is love. Jesus Christ teaches us that the entire Law is contained in the commandment to love God and neighbor. Through the gift of divine love the Christian obtains “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” and fulfills the entire Law “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the Law” “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love”.
So, the Catechism gives us a good start on how to love our neighbor, but what about the first commandment, Love God? What does it mean to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind?
In the definitions of the three, there’s a great deal of overlap. It’s easiest to distinguish them by thinking of the mind as that part of us that thinks and reasons, the soul as that part that is destined for eternal life, and the heart as the seat of our passions, desires, appetites, etc.
How does all that translate into real life?
We are called to love God with every ounce of our being.
With our mind - we are called to give intellectual assent to the Catholic Faith - not just those parts that make sense to us. Not just those parts that we find comfortable. God is three persons in one Being. What does that mean? Does it really make sense? No. It’s a mystery. But we have to accept it as true. Or, more to the current debate, there are moral issues that the world tells us are OK. But the Church has always taught that these issues are wrong. If we say that the Church is wrong on these issues, if we follow the world rather than the Church, are we really loving God with our whole mind?
Loving God with the heart is where it gets really personal. It means engaging your emotions in loving God. LIke I suggested last week, it can involve memorizing portions of scripture and repeating it throughout the day. It can involve meditating on the words of our liturgy, our worship. It may involve praying with icons, or sitting in church praying with the reserved sacrament. And it can involve distancing yourself from those things which lessen your love for God.
Love God and love your neighbor. As our Lord says, on these hinge the Law and the Prophets.
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