30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ex 22:20–26
Second Reading: 1 Thess 1:5c–10
Gospel Reading: Mt 22:34-40
The “greatest and first” commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” Jesus said in the Gospel Reading. The second, he said, is to “love your neighbour as yourself.”
How can we be commanded to love? What if we do not feel love for God? What if we positively dislike our neighbour?
The kind of love Jesus commands is an affair of the will. “He who obeys the commandments He has from Me is the man who loves me,” He said. We are commanded not to feel loving, but to act that way.
The first three commandments and the Church’s precepts tell us how to love God. The last seven commandments tell us how to love our neighbour, and Moses gave some examples in the First Reading.
However, the night before he died, Jesus gave us a “new commandment”: “Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other.”
In Greek, the kind of love He enjoined is agape, in Latin, caritas. The Catechism defines it as “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God.”
That last phrase is important. When we love people for their own sake, we love with one of three natural loves: affection, friendship, or eros (the love that expresses itself in sexual union.).
These loves are not what Jesus commanded. For one thing, they do not go far enough: they do not extend to strangers, let alone enemies, and they have limits. Besides, we cannot produce them to order: to try to do so, or to persuade ourselves that we have done so, would be dishonest.
The love Jesus commanded is the love God has for us. It has no exceptions, limits, conditions, or end. Only for love of God can we love people in this way; and for love of him God commands us to do so.
Do we really love our neighbour if we do so only out of love for God?
Yes. A worldly man treats a few people lovingly because he loves them with a natural love. Paradoxically, a Christian, trying to act lovingly toward everyone, finds himself loving them naturally more and more, and loving naturally more and more people.
“All we do—our prayer, our work, our suffering—is for Jesus,” Mother Teresa said. “Our work has no other reason or motivation. We nurse him, feed him, clothe him, visit him, comfort him in the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the orphans, the dying. I serve Jesus twenty-four hours a day. Whatever I do is for him. This is a point many people do not understand.”
This is not the kind of love we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, usefulness, etc. Any hint that we are being offered agape is a terrible shock. However, there is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. No one can be blamed for not loving it naturally.
All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children may be sure that they are, at least sometimes, receiving agape: that is, being loved not because they are naturally lovable, but because Love himself is in those who love them.
God, who loves us without exception, condition, limit, or end, loves us not because we are lovable, but because he is Love. He does not find us, but makes us, lovable.
“Why should anyone love you?” He asks in the poem The Hound of Heaven. “I am the only one Who makes much of nothing; human love has to be deserved. You do not know how unworthy you are of any love at all. Whom will you find to love you, undeserving as you are, except me, only me?”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2:00 pm in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays at 10:00 am in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of next week’s talk is “The Liturgical Year.” No pre-registration is necessary.
