Also St. Margaret’s Forres
Today's Gospel comes as a brief moment of relief amid the tension and foreboding of St. Mark's Gospel narrative. The episode is set in Holy Week, after Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, to cries of Hosanna. Before and after it we read only of bitter confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. On their side, traps are repeatedly set in order to gain sufficient evidence for his inevitable conviction. On his side, again and again, there are dire warnings of tragedy and destruction. But here we have an encounter which is apparently perfectly happy. This scribe obviously respects Jesus, and genuinely wants to know his view on a question much debated among the Rabbis of the time.
The question he asks happens to be the one closest to Jesus’ heart. Jesus doesn’t have to think hard to find the answer: it is simply his whole life, his prayer, his mission, the summary of all his teaching. Very soon, he’ll give it perfect expression on the cross. At every moment of his life, Jesus perfectly obeyed, or lived out the First Great Commandment. The love Jesus had for God his Father was unlimited, uncompromised, all-consuming, total. And because of it, Jesus also perfectly fulfilled or lived out the Second Great Commandment. His whole life was given up in love for us: love to the end; love so powerful that it could make us lovable; love so transforming that it could enable us to love in our turn.
The command to love God entirely is given by divine revelation, but also it’s in accordance with natural human reason. St. Augustine noted that everyone loves: it’s impossible not to love. But what do you love? It seems obviously foolish to love absolutely what is not absolutely worthy of our love. Unfortunately the power of sin tends to draw people to love in ways contrary to both reason and goodness. We so easily fix our desire on lesser goods – like power, or pleasure, or possessions, or worldly success - even in opposition to greater goods. These disordered kinds of love are never good for us: always they tend to be alienating, and destructive of ourselves and of others. But right love, properly ordered, makes us flourish as human beings. It ennobles us, fulfils us, gives us joy. Love like this makes life beautiful, and worth living. But the supreme love of our life must be that directed towards God, because then it’s directed in accordance with what is true; towards the deepest reality behind all things; towards the love that drives the universe.
Unfortunately, peoples and cultures that have not had the benefit of revelation have usually understood God wrongly, and therefore loved or worshipped Him wrongly. Sometimes God has been thought of as so pure and abstract that He is impossible to relate to in any personal way. In this case, love for Him easily degenerates into ideology, with all the ruthless cruelty that that so often implies. Alternatively, God is given all-too human characteristics, so that He seems bigger, but scarcely better than any of us. Then he has degenerated into merely a pagan god, and love of such a god is idolatry, which always tends to go with folly and wickedness.
The Jews, by contrast, knew that God is One, the only God. They understood that He is all good, all holy; the maker of all that is; infinite, immortal, eternal. And they had only received from Moses the command to love Him after being shown that He first loved them. He was the God of their fathers, the God who had chosen Israel to be His own people, the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and fed them in the wilderness, and brought them at last to the Promised Land. The Jews also understood – as it says in Chapter 1 of Genesis - that every human being is made by God in His own image and likeness. So the idea of responding to God's love for them by loving both self and neighbour was not at all alien to the Jews.
Nevertheless, with the coming of Jesus, these two great commandments take on a completely new meaning. Because of Jesus, we can know and relate to God much more easily than even the Jews could. God is too high for us to attain, but He came down, in Jesus Christ, to reveal Himself to us in a human way, humanly, as a man. Jesus showed us the Father, because, as he says in St. John's Gospel, whoever has seen him, has also seen the Father. And we have greater motivation to love God in Christ, because in Jesus we see God Incarnate hanging on the Cross for love of us.
If our love for God is authentic, fully human, Christ-like, driven by the Holy Spirit, then naturally, inevitably, automatically, it will result in love for ourself, and for our neighbour. Far from being a distraction from our love for God, this love will be a simple consequence of it.
The reason we are required to love ourself and our neighbour is because God does. Just as we can and must forgive, because we have been forgiven, so we can and must love, because we have first been loved. Every human person, whatever their behaviour, bears the image of the Son of God. Christ has laid down his life for them, as for us, and they are infinitely precious in his eyes. To love them then is not just a difficult commandment which we have somehow to screw ourselves up to obey. It’s actually just reasonable, and good for us, and part of our own innate need to respond to God's love for us.
The place where above all we can express our love for God, for ourselves and for our neighbour is the Holy Eucharist. In the Eucharist, Christ's total offering of himself on the Cross to the Father for our sake is made present. In the Eucharist, to use words from today's second reading, Christ continues to make intercession for us. And so at Mass, above all, we enter into that limitless, all-effective prayer. United with Jesus, we offer to God all we are and all we have. And in the Holy Eucharist we have again a pledge and guarantee of God’s total love for us, in total self-gift. Here then, united with Jesus, we pray for the salvation and well being of all the world. United with the prayer of Jesus, our prayer in principle reaches everyone, embraces everyone, raises everyone, ourselves included, up to God the Father. And what do we pray? That we may all together receive, dwell in and respond to His own infinite, Trinitarian love.