The Commandment of Love

March 8th Readings Reflection: Friday of the Third Week of Lent

Today’s Gospel recounts the incident when a scribe asked Jesus which is the greatest commandment. Jesus answered that there are two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In other words, as the Baltimore Catechism succinctly says, “[t]he whole law of God can be reduced to the commandment of love of God, because the proper motive of love of neighbor and love of self is God” (BC #3, q. 189). If we do not love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we cannot properly love ourselves or our neighbour. The love that we possess for ourselves and for our neighbour is disordered if it does not have a love for God as its final purpose. We thus must prioritize our love for God above all other loves in our lives.

One of my priests recently spoke of the importance of praying unceasingly that God help us to love Him increasingly more. Even when we awaken during the night, the priest said, we should ask God to help us love Him. Many prayers and hymns are oriented toward the purpose of increasing our love for God. In St. Alphonsus de Liguori’s Stations of the Cross, we renew our love for Our Lord as we meditate on each Station and implore God, “Grant that I may love Thee always, and then do with me as Thou wilt.”

This fervent love for God will then prompt us to love our neighbour with a true and holy charity. This is the charity of which today’s Gospel speaks, a charity that “is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” We can never attain a perfect love for God or for our neighbour in this life, and we often fail in our love for God and our neighbour by falling into sin. Consequently, we must spend every moment of our earthly lives striving to love God more and more, seeking to imitate His perfect love by the power of His grace. When we do this, we have the promise of eternal life as our reward, as Jesus Himself told the scribe in the Gospel: “[Y]ou are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

“Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore! O make us love Thee more and more! O make us love Thee more and more!” (“Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All,” by Fr. Frederick Faber)

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