The Greatest Commandment

Today’s Gospel tells the story of the Pharisees trying to trick Jesus by asking Him which commandment in law is the greatest. Jesus answers first by giving the greatest commandment, which is very simply to love the Lord God, “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Simple but immense – Jesus is summing up with this commandment (and the second which follows) much of Judaic law as written in the Old Testament and the demand is intense – to love God totally in a transformative way such that this love directs our thoughts and actions.

Jesus then goes one step beyond the question, to twin with the greatest commandment the second, which “is like it,” suggesting that it flows from the first naturally and carries similar requirements – “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I’m always struck in this passage that when you think about the words, the demand is greater than you might first anticipate. To love neighbor as self suggests to live completely and unselfishly for other – to care for, respond to and act for another in the same way you’d look after yourself. It’s a pretty countercultural message in a world obsessed with ‘me’ – what I need, what I want, how to take care of me. But of course, that’s part of the package, too – to love neighbor “as yourself.” This means that Jesus wants us to love ourselves, the person God made us in all our brokenness and goodness, and then to step outside ourselves and apply that same exact love to others. While it doesn’t carry the commercial message of caring for yourself with all your material needs, it does mean that we can’t love another truly until we’re willing to love and accept ourselves, a very tall order I think. In his Summa Theologica, when addressing whether love as an act of charity is the same as benevolence in Aristotle’s Ethics, St. Thomas Aquinas discusses love in response to Aristotle as “an act of the will which intends good. But it includes a union of affection with the loved one, which is not implied in benevolence … as the philosopher [Aristotle] says in the same passage, these are characteristic of friendship because they spring from the love with which a man loves himself. That is to say, a man does all these things for his friend as if for himself, by reason of the union of affection of which we have spoken.” To give the best love completely to other, it has to stem from a love of self, and then equating other to self in how we live.