The Two Wings of Love!

(Homily for the 31^stSunday in Ordinary Time Year B)

God wants all of our heart, all of our mind, and all of our soul. It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care for our neighbour, not as an activity which distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God who is revealed to us as the God of all people. It is in God that we find our neighbours and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbour become a neighbour rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.

(Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder)

     The three readings of today presents with different degree and intensity the theme of love, orchestrated in the two wings of: love of God and love of neighbour, especially in the first reading and the Gospel passage. The second reading instead presents in an existential and concrete manner what it really entails to love God and neighbour through the priestly offering of Jesus. Therefore, the question of and on love launches us both to the realms of being and doing, for God is love, and as creatio imago Dei we participate in this agapic ontology of God and at the same time called to practice it existentially. It is therefore a response to God’s revelation of himself as the One True God. The two wings of love exist in a cruciform, and as such, the authentic manifestation of one, presupposes the presence of the other. To say it with Henri J. M. Nouwen, “A growing intimacy with God deepens our sense of responsibility for others”.

     The first reading (Deut. 6:2-6) presents the famous Shemah, which serves as an invitation, to the people of Israel to a joyful, total and profound love of God. In the first paragraph, we see the supposedly response of Israel to God who fulfilled his promise of a Promised Land. They have to fulfil their own part of the Covenant; the Israelites have to keep the law of God. The second paragraph is the famous ‘Shemah’ (Hear, O Israel), an old Jewish prayer, which every faithful Hebrew believer prayed every morning. God is to be loved in response to his revelation as the One True God. In the context of the Deuteronomist, to love means to trust wholly in God and corollarily to reject other gods.

     In the Hebraic perception, the faculties designated for the love of God, heart, soul and might are not separate human faculties, and rather they denote man in the totality of his being. The invitation to love God “with all the heart, with all the soul and with all the strength” presupposes that we have to love God without limit, we have to love God with all because God is all in all. God is the Supreme Being. In connection with the Gospel, the passage of the first reading, presented the vertical dimension of the commandment of love, while the Gospel completes the cruciform, by presenting not only the vertical but also the horizontal dimensions of love.

     In the Gospel (Mk. 12:28-34) we see an encounter that occasioned Jesus’ teaching on love and the amalgamation of the two wings of love. This time it is a scribe or rather a doctor, an expert in the law of Moses, who confronted Jesus with an interrogation on the commandments. From all indications, he did not confront Jesus with the intension to put him to the test or to challenge him, rather he puts his question to Jesus with respect and with a sincere desire to obtain a reliable judgement on a question of great importance at that time. It is plausible to know that in the Bible, in the first five books of the Old Testament, that is the Pentateuch, we have 613 commandments or divine precepts, of which 365 are prohibitions while 248 are positive precepts. However, of all these laws, the ten commandment remains the core. It is obvious that all the divine precepts cannot be considered at the same level with the same importance. This is the pivot around which revolves the question of the scribe: what is the first or the most important of all the commandments? (Mk. 12:28).

     To this question, Jesus responded in a rather prompt and exhaustive manner. He made a combination of two Old Testament passages: Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. First, He made reference to the words of the book of Deuteronomy, the passage of our first reading today. He says: “This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the One, Only Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” (vv.29-30). Here, we notice that the commandment started with an important presupposition; that the Lord our God is One and there is no other. It begins with the absolute and unique Lordship and majesty of God. Be that as it may, this God that is unique and absolute, from whom all is derived, ought to be loved with the totality of one’s being and person. We ought to love Him with our all. But the question we have to ask ourselves today is: do we truly love God with our all? As such, to the One and True God we have to show our total and unreserved love, and this is actually nothing but a response to his prevenient love towards us, without our merit. It is by virtue of this love that “we live and move and exist” in him (Act. 17:28), this indeed is a compenetration of love.

     Similarly, in responding to the scribe, Jesus didn’t limit himself to the specification of the first or the most important commandment. Instead, he announces another, “The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these” (v.31). This time Jesus alludes to the book of Leviticus (19:18). Therein, the neighbour is not limited to those living around you or those you share common provenience with, rather every man and woman. The love one has to show to his neighbour, that is, to any man or woman, has to be equivalent  to the love that the person has for him/herself. In Jesus’ parlance, the two commandments are interconnected in a radical manner, for love of God without love of neighbour is illusory, while love of neighbour devoid of the love of God is nothing but rebranded self-love.

     Upon the above backdrop, we would like to make two considerations: ● First, Jesus is not interested so much to establish a sort of priority on these two commandments with respect to others, but he helped us to understand the fundamental exigency with which we have to live all the divine laws,  all has to be carried out as an expression of the dual love of God and neighbour. ● Second, Jesus links intimately the two commandments: love of God and of neighbour. In Jesus parlance, they are like the two faces of the same coin; for the love of the Creator can not but be concretized in the love of the creatures. In the same vein, if you love Christ you cannot but love those redeemed by and through His blood. We are therefore invited to love God in our brothers and sisters. Here, the other (our neighbour) is the sacrament of Christ. In fact, in the words of Jesus: “whatever you do to the least of my brothers you do to me” (Mt. 25:40).

     Furthermore, in the teaching of Jesus, the Christian love has two dimensions: vertical and horizontal, and both are interconnected and they vivify each other reciprocally. They are like the two wings of the same bird, one cannot function well without the other. The love of neighbour reveals the measure of the love of God, for as St. John opined: “Anyone who says I love God and hates his brothers, is a liar, since whoever does not love the brother whom he can see cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1Jn. 4:20). And St. Paul will put it in a more succinct manner thus: “The whole of the Law is summarized in the one commandment: You must love your neighbour as yourself” (Gal. 5:14), presenting this synthesis of the law in an imperative form, no doubt suggests its pivotal nature.

     On hearing the response of Jesus, the scribe was convinced that he confirmed the veracity of Jesus’ response, “Well spoken, Master; what you have said is true” (v. 32). He was satisfied with the response of Jesus. Jesus concluded the encounter by complimenting that lawyer: “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (v.34). The evangelist asserts that after this wonderful response of Jesus, no one dared to question him again. Drawing the issue further, we cannot forget that this is not exhaustive of Jesus’ teaching on love, especially on the horizontal dimension. His teaching on love is in a progressive way or better in a crescendo, for in this passage, the love for oneself should be the measure of love for others, but elsewhere Jesus shifted the paradigm and took this to its Christological dimension, when at the Last Supper he said: “I give you a new commandment: “love one another; you must love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 13:34). Henceforth, Christ and not man becomes the measure of love. It is no longer: love your neighbour as you love yourself, but love one another as I have loved you. This is the novelty introduced by Jesus. Therefore, Jesus is the measure and model of Christian love. He demonstrated this at the episode of the washing of feet (cf. Jn.13). The invitation to love as Christ loved and loves us expresses the sublime nature of love. It is indeed, this love that explains the vulnerability of God-Emmanuel, Jesus!

     The second reading (Heb. 7:23-28) once again continues the theme of Christ’s priesthood, but this time around in comparison with the levitical priests. Jesus in his priestly self-giving and sacrifice demonstrates to us how to love God and our neighbour, for a priest stands as a mediator between God and man. Indeed, his priestly function reveals the two dimensions of love: love of God and neighbour. Before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD the Jewish priests offered animals daily in sacrifice, but of Jesus the writer of the letter to the Hebrews affirms: “Those priests were many because they were prevented by death from remaining in office, but he, because he remains forever, has a priesthood that does not pass away…He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did that once and for all when he offered himself” (Heb. 7:23-24,27). Here the writer sets out to expose his crucial theological theme, which consists in the comparison of Jesus with the levitical priests of the old covenant. The author demonstrated that Jesus and his priestly works surpass those of the levitical priests. In the comparison list, we see that:

►They levitical priests were many, but Jesus is the only one. ►They were impermanent, but Jesus is eternal. ►They levitical priests were subject to death, but Jesus lives forever. ►They were sinners and had to offer sacrifices for their sins too, but Jesus is sinless. ►They repeated sacrifices but Jesus’ sacrifice is once-for-all etc. The list can continue on and on. Above all, the existential crux of this passage points to the Eucharist as the concrete reality of Jesus’ sacrifice, though in an unbloody manner. The priestly offering of Jesus reveals in no small way that we are loved by God. A priest is in a constant cosmic movement: vertically and horizontally, of bringing God’s favour, blessings and message to man, and at the same time takes man’s supplications to God. The priesthood indeed, is an eloquent expression of the two wings of love.

     In all, going back to the Gospel passage, the originality of Jesus is not on the fact that he recalled the two important commandments, but on uniting the two together as the two faces of the same coin. He synthetized the two in one commandment, in fact St. John  asserted that “This is the commandment we have received from him, that whoever loves God, must also love his brother” (1Jn. 4:21). Thus, speaking on the Christian love of God and neighbour, we have to guide against two possible erroneous tendencies: First, is the tendency to love humanity, and relegating God at the background, that is a sort of Philanthropism. Second, is the tendency of the illusion of loving God without regard and care for man, this is a sort of spiritual intimism. In the words of an Italian writer, Bruno Maggioni, whenever and wherever this two manifestations of Christian love is separated, there is falsity and idolatry. Lord Jesus, help us to love You and to love our neighbours! Amen!!

(Fr. Vitus(Fr. Vitus Chigozie, SC)