For example, the famous Pharisee Hillel summarised the law like this: ‘What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.’ For his part, Jesus compressed two verses from the Hebrew Scriptures to summarise the Torah – the first from Deuteronomy, on loving God, and the second from Leviticus on love of neighbour. His saying, referred to in today’s Gospel as the Greatest Commandment or Golden Rule, captured the essence of the Christian life. Although we call it the Greatest Commandment, it is made up of two commandments.
Christian faith cannot be reduced to simply loving God because in loving God we must love our neighbour. Christian faith cannot be reduced to loving our neighbour without first loving God. So, both are inexorably linked, and we could say that the very Mission of the Church, its raison d’être, is to encourage us to be faithful in doing both.
St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the outstanding theologians of the Catholic Church, the author of many theological and philosophical tomes. He was canonised in 1323 and officially declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567. However not many people know that he once had an experience of God’s love that so overwhelmed and even crushed him that he never wrote another thing. In fact, he looked back on what he had written about God as ‘straw’ compared to the moment of having received a taste of God’s love.
Indeed, many centuries before St. Thomas Aquinas, another Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine wrote this: ‘To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances; to seek him, the greatest adventure; to find him the greatest human achievement.’ Our vocation invites us to discover this love, to seek it out, to mine for it in the Scriptures, to plumb its depths and ultimately to rest in its security. Rooted then in this love, the love of God, we discover the strength to love not only our neighbour but also our enemies.
‘Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and endure for all eternity. And happy are those who live and die in God’s love.’ (Franz Jägerstätter).
