Which is the first of all the commandments?
There is a right way and a wrong way to ask this question. A good version of the question might be, 'What is the one principle that makes all the others make sense?' A bad version might be, 'What is the only thing we really need to give attention so that we can ignore the others?'
In answering that the first and greatest commandment is the commandment to love God with our entire being some people might have excused themselves from love of neighbor when those two things seemed to conflict. It often seemed that the Pharisees set love of God against love of neighbor and used it as an excuse to ignore their neighbors even when they were in need.
The answer Jesus gave allowed no wiggle room to divide one commandment against another. He said that love of God was first and foremost but not without mentioning the command to love neighbor as well. He specified that it was together that they were the greatest. Separated, neither command was properly itself.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these."
We have been told that we can't properly love the God whom we cannot see if we do not love the neighbors who are visible and close at hand (see First John 4:20). But it is even more emphatically true that we can't adequately love our neighbor without the grace we receive from our relationship with God. The verse before the one cited above is central, "We love because he first loved us" (see First John 4:19).
You are right in saying
It is possible to affirm the truth of Jesus' answer and still be outside the Kingdom. This scribe understood that what Jesus was saying mattered more than burnt offerings and sacrifices. But he did not yet understand how Jesus himself would bridge the gap by becoming the one sacrifice that would truly empower us to love God and neighbor with all of our hearts.
And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
We should eventually come to realize that it is not by the questions we ask nor even by the answers we give that we prove ourselves righteous. It is by faith that we receive the power of the Holy Spirit to love with God's own love. At a certain point questions are only a distraction that reveal our distance from the living flame of love. When we reach the limits of our own understanding let us learn to listen instead to what God is saying to us, "I am the Lord your God: hear my voice". Then we will understand that "You are not far from the Kingdom of God" is not a condemnation but rather an invitation to the Kingdom in which Jesus himself is the Lord of our hearts.
No comments:
Post a Comment