Jesus gets right to the heart of things in this gospel. The two great commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else, all the prophets, all the writings of Moses, all of it, depends on and derives from just these two commands.
And that really is quite remarkable. Some of you, I imagine, have probably read the Old Testament, have read Moses and the prophets, and if you have then you know that the Old Testament is not a short collection of books. Just within the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, there have traditionally been identified no less than 613 commandments, and yet Jesus tells us that all of these are reducible to just two. And this dynamic is not merely seen in the Old Testament. We see it too across the entire New Testament, with all of its moral imperatives, is all of which is expressive of these two commandments, and not the New Testament only, but also all the writings of the Fathers, all the decrees of the councils, all the formal teachings and dogmas of the Church, and even all the individual examples of holiness that we observe across the centuries. As I talked about last weekend, the Church´s social teaching is an unfolding into concrete circumstance of these two commandments, as St. John helps us to see when he reminds us that we cannot love God whom we have not seen if we do not love our brother whom we have seen, and which especially encompasses what we heard in our first reading: you shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the Land of Egypt. Indeed the whole of salvation history and the entirety of all that is good and holy in the history of the Christian world, all of it is an unfolding of these two commandments, the whole great edifice resting on what seems so slender a reed: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
Of course, these two commandments, though they are but a few words, support so great a structure because the reality at which they point is quite literally deeper than the foundations of the earth and grander than the splendor of the heavens. Because this is the fundamental truth: God made the entire cosmos in order to have us, to have you and me and everyone else who has ever lived, and he made us to be loved by him so that we might love in return while also loving one another. It is not too strong a thing, then, to say that the love to which Christ calls us in today’s gospel is the same love that motivated the creation of the universe, that hung the sun and the moon in the sky and set the stars and planets in their courses. It is the love that marks the very life of God, the inner dynamism of the Holy Trintiy. That is what we are called to, when Jesus tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves.
And so perhaps then it isn’t really any wonder at all that the enactment of commandments which are so profound entail so much, no wonder that we find so many hundreds of precepts and teachings from across the ages that flesh out for us in a concrete way what it means to love God and neighbor, as these most general of principles are applied to particular circumstances, indeed to every particular circumstance. And the reason that they reach into everything, as should be obvious, is because these commandments touch us at the deepest possible level, on the level of our very existence, since, as we said, we were created, we exist, precisely so that we can love in this way. And so the demands made upon us by these injunctions are total: we are to love with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind. There is no aspect of our lives, no aspect of ourselves, that is not to be governed by these two commandments.
And so everything that we do ought to have at its foundation this all-encompassing love of God, this love that is the point and purpose of everything that we are. And that means that everything that we do matters, everything is either bringing us more and more into that love, or else it is taking us further and further away.
And this is a wonderful thing, but it is also a great call and a great challenge. In my homily last weekend I explored one aspect of that challenge as it relates to the political life, but more broadly each of us can ask ourselves: Where am I still half-hearted when it comes to loving God and neighbor? What portions of my heart and my soul and my mind do I hold back from God? In what ways am I resisting the love for which I was made, preferring instead to cling to what is, in the final analysis, meaningless?
You shall love the Lord your God Love with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself, two simple, all-reaching, all-encompassing commandments. Our task in this life is nothing other than, with the help of God, to fulfill those commandments in ourselves and in our lives. And when we do that, our lives become concrete manifestations, little incarnations even, of the love of God and love of neighbor. That is what it means to be a saint, and that is our calling.
And so, if you want practical advice on how to love completely, on how to be fully what it is that God made you to be, then look to the saints! Imitate their lives and follow their example, and never tire of striving for holiness. Brothers and sisters, our calling is a great calling, and it will require everything of us. And so, like so many holy men and women throughout the ages, may we too hold nothing back in heart, soul, or mind, and so allow ourselves to be transformed by the all-encompassing love of God.
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