Sunday’s Gospel from Matthew 22:34–40 offers us Jesus’ teaching on the greatest commandment — a single commandment with dual elements. I’d like to get my bearings with this dizzying passage before reflecting on it.
This week’s drama begins with a scene change. The Sadducees, members of the priestly party, had just approached Jesus with a question pertaining to resurrection from the dead. The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. Jesus sets them straight on this matter — silencing them — and they move along. The Pharisees return the stage. A hostile scholar of the law (a lawyer, a scribe = an interpreter and teacher of Mosaic law), approaches Jesus to test/tempt him: “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Now, there were 613 commands of the Mosaic law and while the rabbis distinguished commandments as “light” or “heavy” (see Jerome Commentary), “for the devout Jew all the commandments were to be kept with equal care” (see NAB footnote). So I guess this is the “test,” that by identifying a “greatest” commandment, you jeopardize keeping the whole law with equal care.
Jesus responds with the greatest double commandment: love God and love neighbor as self. Regarding love of God, Jesus quotes from the Shema (Deut 6:4–5) and makes it clear that he’s talking about a complete and perfect love of God with the triple repetition of “with all your.” The Father loves completely and perfectly; we must respond in kind. Mother Teresa has a great line in this regard: “Why must we give ourselves fully to God? Because God has given Himself to us. If God who owes nothing to us is ready to impart to us no less than Himself shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves?”1 God doesn’t ask for a portion or a fraction of our love, but all of it.
But, Jesus doesn’t stop there. To the text from Deuteronomy 6:4–5, he adds Leviticus 19:18: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” Do to your neighbor as you would do to yourself. Care for your neighbor as you care for yourself. The Jerome Commentary makes this observation: “The novelty of the statement of Jesus does not consist in quoting this commandment [i.e., about love of God from Deut 6:5]…The novelty consists in placing Lev 19:18 on the same level, making it equally ‘heavy.’” A rather poignant line from Dorothy Day captures the weightiness of “leveling” love of God and neighbor. She says, “we love God as much as the one we love the least.”2 The Father loves perfectly and completely, and even loves his enemies. He asks us to love his friends and his enemies, the good and the bad. They’re all our neighbors. If we are to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48), then this means loving our neighbors, even bad ones, perfectly.
Now, we do need to call a timeout before going any further. It does seem like there’s a logical contradiction between the two commandments. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis points this out, saying the “all-consuming absoluteness of the first would seem to preclude the demands of the second.” Doesn’t loving God with all I am and all I have leave me depleted? Leiva-Merikakis answers:
The affirmation I am the LORD concluding the commandment in Leviticus provides the solution. In the first place, the second commandment, while absolute in its universality of reach, nevertheless enjoins a relative manner of loving in clear contrast to the first commandment. We are to love our neighbor, not as we love God—with all our heart, soul, and mind—but, rather, as we love ourselves. This means we will not deny our neighbor any good we want for ourselves or inflict on him an evil we fear for ourselves. We will love God and only God with wholehearted adoration and total self-surrender and obedience, and we will love both ourselves and our neighbor as creatures bound to one another precisely by owing God everything.
I am the LORD: ‘If you love me as you ought, and only then, will you be able to love yourselves and others as you need to be loved.’ In other words, the second commandment is not the same as the first but is “like it” because they both contain the imperative to love as the fundamental secret of being human and also because the ability to love one’s neighbor as oneself can only flow from the practice of the first commandment. No one can love himself or another fruitfully unless he first loves God absolutely. Human love must continually nourish itself from the wellspring of uncreated, eternal love flowing from the Heart of God. Created love can never be autonomous. Not for a single moment can it exist outside the uncreated Being of the God who is Love.3
Human love is dependent, in other words. And this concept of dependence pushes us into the last line of Sunday’s Gospel: “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” Etymologically, “to depend” is to “hang down from.” The Greek word used here gets at suspending. By saying “the law and the prophets depend,” is to say the entire revelation of the Old Testament hangs suspended from the dual commandment. No small statement.
Prayerful Reading
Amongst many elements, I’m struck by these words:
ASYOURSELF
I’ve always found it fascinating that there’s a kind of condition placed on love of neighbor. One is to love God with his whole heart, soul, and mind, a kind of complete and unconditional love. But we’re to love neighbor to the degree with which we love ourselves. This quickly becomes problematic. First, what does it mean “to love.” Second, what does it mean to love myself? If I’m to “be perfect” as God is perfect, which means loving perfectly, have I ever done that? Have I ever loved myself perfectly so as to love my neighbor perfectly? And this isn’t even touching the call to love God perfectly. These two little words “ASYOURSELF” open so many problems. How can we deal with this?
Let’s hop aboard a train of thought that comes from Josef Pieper and Joseph Ratzinger. It goes along this line and it essentially provides the ground for the Gospel:
Joy is the peace or harmony I experience within myself when I love myself. This concept of “loving myself,” in Pieper’s mind, would have to do with affirming my own existence — “it is good that I exist.”
The problem is, I don’t love myself, or I certainly don’t love myself perfectly and all the time. I’m aware of my faults, my sins, my wounds, and so forth. Like Job, many of us have wrestled with that question of whether or not things would be better off if we never existed, especially after we’ve boogered up things pretty badly. If I can’t affirm or accept or love myself perfectly, then I can’t love my neighbor perfectly.
In order to love myself, I need to be loved by another. My ability to love myself depends upon the love of another human. You can start to see, here, the extent to which we depend — socially, relationally — on others in order to survive and thrive as persons. So, I need to be loved by another in order to love myself; my self-love depends upon being loved. The problem is, I’m to love myself perfectly in order to love you perfectly, and you don’t love me perfectly because nobody in this post-lapsarian world (i.e., the world after the Fall) loves perfectly. Human love is broken, ignorant, incomplete, and, most importantly, finite. It is mortal. Human love seems to die. The cold harshness of the gravestone seems to have the final say and what it seems to say is that love is not stronger than death. Yet I long for a love that’s stronger than death, a love that can hold me in existence and carry me beyond the grave.
God takes flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and loves me and you with a divine, eternal, infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc. love that’s made accessible in and through his humanity. The depths of this love are proven by his suffering and death. This is how we know we are truly loved (see Rom 6:8).
Because Jesus loves me, then I can love me, too. Because he says “yes, it’s good that you exist” to me, I can say “yes, it’s good I exist.” In other words, I can start to love myself, see myself with the love that God has for me. In this is joy, true joy (= Gospel, glad tidings, a message that brings joy). Joy is the sense of harmony and peace that comes from accepting myself. The problem is that, on my own and in my fallen state, I can’t love myself. I need to be loved perfectly by another. Jesus answers this deepest cry of the human heart. God answers this prayer in the person of Jesus who does love me, and he loves me with a love that has conquered the grave. If he’s loved me, then I can love me too, and I can be at peace. I can be joyful.
And, if I can start to love myself in and with his love, then I can start to love you, my neighbor, with that same love. This is the spiritual core of evangelization; it is nothing other than charity.
And, if I can love myself with his love and love you with his love, then, in doing all this, I begin, in the concreteness of my given circumstances, to love God. Loving our neighbor is like a formation in learning how to love God, and loving God naturally leads to loving neighbor, because you can’t love God and hate that which he has created in his image and called his own. We can’t love God and hate our neighbor and dealing with his messiness, nor can we truly love our neighbor without loving his ultimate source and destiny. Nowhere does all of this become more palpable than within the context of Holy Mass and at the time of the Eucharistic prayer, in the Sign of Peace, and so forth, and we begin to see that everything is grace.
Pope Benedict XVI summarizes all of this in Deus Caritas Est, §18:
Love of neighbour is thus shown to be possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern…Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.
And, of course, we have a wonderful synthesis in 1 John 4:19–21:
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Those two little words ASYOURSELF, then, open to the whole of the Christian Gospel and make way for it.
Please use the comments to share your own lectio reflections if you’d like. It’s always a blessing to experience lectio within community — even online!
Mother Teresa, Total Surrender, 36.
Day, The Reckless Way of Love, 36. To this she attaches her own commentary: “It’s a terrible thought.”
Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, vol. 3, 584–85.