Friday, March 28, 2025
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Third Week of Lent |
| Mark 12:28–34 |
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Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus asserts that the whole law depends upon two commandments: loving God with everything you have and loving your neighbor as yourself. This first commandment echoes the Old Testament shema prayer found in Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” What is interesting here is that Jesus does not feel the slightest compulsion to mitigate the exclusivity of the shema when he adds the second commandment. The one who is to love his neighbor is precisely the one who is summoned to love the Lord with all his heart, soul, and mind. Nothing prevents the one who utterly and completely loves God from loving, simultaneously, the good things to which God continually gives rise. Since God is entirely responsible for the being of whatever he creates, and since the world adds nothing to the divine perfection, in loving God, one is implicitly loving everything that God sustains in existence. This is why the spiritual masters can speak of loving God in the first place and then loving everything else for the sake of God. |