Wanting to sum something up in a brief statement – is a not uncommon reaction to a complex even overwhelming world of ideas. One such phrase might be Lincoln’s famous summary of democracy, ‘Government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ Similarly It would make it so much easier if as a Christian you could explain your faith to someone in a single sentence.
Amongst the Jews of Jesus’ day there was also a desire for a single resonant sentence which would sum up the law. Which was the greatest commandment from which the rest of the law might be deduced? When they approached Jesus with this question they were clearly testing him out. The question was set to test him because the Pharisees suspected Jesus of being a law breaker. The law consisted of a mass of detailed clauses – as many perhaps as 613. Was it necessary to keep them all or were some more important than others? For the Pharisees, the law is the law and there can be no exceptions – perhaps Jesus might say something different, something less strict and then his opponents would have found further grounds for condemning him as a false teacher.
So Jesus is once again in a tight spot; but his answer is impeccable. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ Jesus has not made this up. He is combining texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, except that he has made one perhaps significant change – in the original it says that we are to love God with all our strength, Jesus says that we are to love God with all our mind.
Love God and love your neighbour is a good instruction to hold onto not just because it is concise but because it opens up further reflection. What does it mean to love God and how are the two commandments connected with one another?
The first point to make is that this is not primarily to do with emotion. You may feel emotion in your relationship with God or neighbour but that is your personal affair. Jesus is not instructing us how we should feel; you cannot command an emotion. Of course it is important that your emotional life becomes a part of your Christian life; it is important that you should be moved by the thought of God or by the plight of your neighbour; but no one, not even Jesus, let alone a preacher can dictate how your emotions should work or what you should feel.
The second point to make is that love of God comes first. And perhaps we might therefore deduce that the second is dependent on the first. Love of God is the foundation of and inspiration for the love of neighbour.
But what does it mean to love God? How can you love what is infinitely beyond your grasp, how can you love what you cannot picture in your mind? We might begin to answer these questions by asking ourselves what are the signs of love? How can you tell if a person loves someone else? To be in love with someone, is to keep them in mind, to be devoted to them, to think about what they would like, to put their needs before your own, to want to get to know them more and more deeply, to be with them in heart and soul and mind. And in many and various ways that can be true of our love of God; not to let a day go by without thinking of God, holding God in mind, giving up time simply to hold yourself in silence putting yourself mentally in the presence of God; to reflect on what God might want of you, how you might do things that would reflect the life of Jesus in your life. And if you can do all these things then you will be loving God and your love will gradually change you because your mind and heart will be stretched and opened out – there will be more room in your heart and mind for what is out there and beyond you – your capacity for love of God and love of neighbour will grow.
I said earlier that in taking words from Deuteronomy Jesus changed one word – where it said that we should love God with all our might – he said that we should love God with all our mind. The word used for mind can also be translated ‘understanding.’ Perhaps in our world the phrase might be taken to mean that your love of God should stretch your mind – it should take you into ways of thinking and talking that you had never thought of as possible. It should also mean, however, that faith is not a matter of cleverness; it should rather be a matter of never being afraid to ask questions and to push as children will push until they have found a satisfactory answer – satisfactory that is for the moment; in faith any good answer will always open up a further question.
I’ve also said that to learn to love God in this way will increase your capacity to love your neighbour – in becoming more attentive to God you will become more self forgetful and more attentive to the needs of those around you and you will begin to see how you might respond to those needs. But Jesus does not just tell you to love your neighbour – he tells you to love your neighbour as yourself. Self love is clearly not something Jesus elsewhere encourages; we can only be saved if we are prepared to give up self. But here I think we see another reason why the first commandment to love God must come first. St Bernard put it rather well. In the progress into faith we begin with our inbred egotism – the love of self for self’s sake. As we begin to know about God and to pray we may begin to love God for self’s sake. We pray for our own needs, we join a church and find that we get something out of it. But as faith goes deeper so we may begin to love God for God’s sake – we become at least occasionally swept up by a sense of the glory of God. But then says St Bernard there comes a fourth stage where we may just begin to love ourselves for God’s sake. In our love for God we may just be enabled to begin to love ourselves because he created us and watches over us and wills for us abundance of life.
There is then finally a Trinity in love itself; love of God, love of neighbour, love of self are all profoundly bound up with each other and we cannot have any one of them with out the others. Until we have learnt to love God we cannot truly be in love and only in love will we discover how to love our neighbours and our self.