LOVE IS EVERYTHING
The Jews arrived at counting up to 630 commandments that ought to be observed in order to fulfill the Law with integrity. That’s why it wasn’t strange in the rabbinical circles to ask questions like the one they put to Jesus in trying to seek what’s essential: which commandment is the first one of all?
Jesus responds clearly and precisely: «The first one is: “Love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole being”. The second one is this: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”. There’s no greater commandment than these». How to hear these fundamental words of Jesus today?
There’s something that gets revealed to us with complete clarity: love is everything. What’s asked of us in life is to love. There’s the key. We can later pull out all kinds of consequences and derivations, but what’s essential is to live before God and others in an attitude of love. If we would be able to always act that way, everything would be saved. There’s nothing more important than this, not even if you please, the practice of a determined religion.
But why is love the power that gives meaning, truth and fulness to life? This centrality of love is rooted, according to Christian faith, in one reality: God, the origin of all life, God Self is love. That is the daring and unbeatable definition of Christian faith: «God is love» (1 John 4,8). To say it in another way, although it be deficient, God consists in loving; God doesn’t know, doesn’t want, can’t do any other thing than to love. We can doubt everything, but what we mustn’t ever doubt is God’s love.
Precisely for this reason, to love God is to encounter our own being. What gives true glory to God isn’t our evil, but our life and fulness. Whoever loves God and knows oneself loved by God with infinite love, learns to see oneself, value oneself and take care of oneself with true love. What power and dynamism this particular way of understanding ourselves generates within us. How many fears and anxieties dissolve within us. How different life is when the person learns to say: «Lord, may your will be done, because that’s also how my good is being shaped».
On the other hand, it’s then that we understand in its true profundity the second commandment: «Love your neighbor as you love yourself». Whoever loves God knows that she can’t live in an attitude of indifference, unpreoccupied or forgetful of others. The only human posture in the face of any person whatsoever that we encounter in life is to love them.
This doesn’t mean that we must live in the same way in the intimacy with our spouse, the relationship with a client or a chance meeting with someone in the street. What’s being asked of us is to act in each case seeking positively the welfare for them that we want for ourselves. In these time in which it seems we question everything, it’s good to remember that there’s something unquestionable: a person is a human being when she knows how to love God and love her neighbor.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
