Once again, Jesus is faced with religious authorities, this time the Pharisees, who want to pose a question to confound Jesus. He is asked, “Which is the greatest commandment?” Jesus’ answer is standard for a learned Jew of the time. The greatest commandment for any faithful Jew would be taken from Deuteronomy 6:5, the first words of the Jewish Morning Prayer: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” These verses are nothing new, but Jesus links the first with a verse from Leviticus (19:18) to suggest that they are inseparable. To fulfill the commandment to love God, one must also love one’s neighbor as oneself. Seeing the dependence of loving God with loving one’s neighbor would have been a new take for his scholarly interlocutors on traditional texts.
Why do we find it easier to “love God” than loving one’s “neighbor”?
The simple answer is that God is so far beyond our understanding that he can be
an abstraction wholly outside our experience. God is the mystery of the
Trinity, the one who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-loving, etc. We can
impose any form, any mythical set of attributes, and effectively create a God
to our liking. We can even use Scripture to proof-text a God to our liking. We
can reference the angry God leading his faithful into battle if we are vengeful.
If we want something tamer, we can have the God of the Twenty-third Psalm leading
us beside the still waters, refreshing our souls. As Christians, we have Jesus
as Emmanuel, “God with us”. But that doesn’t always make it easier.
If trying to discern who God is from the Old Testament is complex,
the New Testament in general and the gospels in particular can be equally
challenging. We have the person of Jesus: the rabble-rouser overturning tables
in the Temple during Passover and the compassionate Jesus healing a sick child.
We have Jesus declaring in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they
shall be called the children of God,” and the Jesus who says five chapters
later in Matthew 10:34: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Admittedly, these are taken wildly out of context, but they offer the many
extremes and, even with context, the often tricky sayings of Jesus that are
difficult to reconcile. This difficulty has also led to many choosing the Jesus
they wish to follow; those who are peacemakers favor Jesus in Matthew 5, while
those who are more bellicose have highlighted Matthew 10:34. What is a
Christian to do?
Rather than seek a God, or a Savior, that fits who we are,
let us struggle to sit with the contradictions we find and seek the collective
wisdom of the Church and of the many Saints who have lived the gospel, those
who have been canonized and those in our lives who resonate deeply with us as
being holy. We should abandon fashioning anyone in “our image” since our image
(like the image of Caesar in last Sunday’s gospel) belongs to God. We should
allow sacred stories to challenge us and demand personal change first before societal change. Let me suggest a life of prayer and a life of
the Sacraments are excellent places for Catholics to begin to live from the mystery rather than living outside the mystery. We never “figure
it out,” but instead, through the disciplines of prayer, the Sacraments, and
wise counsel, we become people in a fuller relationship that is Christ; it is a
relationship, not a study, not simply a philosophical problem we need
to confront. It is, ultimately, ourselves we need to confront and allow God to form
us daily in His image from which we
have been created.
We love God, then, only when we have learned to love like God, revealed in Scripture, yes,
but also in a life formed by prayer and in sacrificial service to a world
desperate for some Good News.
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