Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus gives us his own commandment for how we are to live: “love one another as I have loved you.” So Christ’s command to us is to love the way that he loves. In order to fully grasp this, we must understand that love is the very heart of God’s commandments to us. All three of the synoptic gospels (Mt 22:34-40, Mk 12:28-34, Lk 10:25-28) tell of the Great Commandment and the commandment that is like the Great Commandment. The Great Commandment can be summarized as loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. The second command, the one that is like this, is to love your neighbor as yourself. Especially in Matthew’s version of this episode, Jesus goes on to indicate that all of the Law and the Prophets are summarized in these two commandments. So we can consider all of the other commandments to be clarifications for how we are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
If we dig a little deeper, we find something interesting. Paul, in chapter 13, verse 9 of his letter to the Romans, says that all of the commandments can be summarized as “love your neighbor as yourself.” Not even a mention of “love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength!” What is happening here? John helpfully explains this in his first letter (1 Jn 4:20). Here John points out that a person who does not love the brother or sister he sees, cannot love the God he does not see. In other words, our love, or lack of love, for our fellow human beings, and especially the people who are present in our lives, tells us how much we actually love God. So if you want to know how much you really love God, be realistic about how you love the people in your life. And so we come full circle: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Reflection by Fr. Aquinas Keusenkothen, OSB
Posted in Article for Easter, Daily Reflections