440. Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 620 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The first commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.

THE TEXTS of this Sunday’s Mass show us once again the profound unity between the Old and New Testaments. In the first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, we see this first commandment already enunciated. Listen, Israel: the Lord, our God, is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. It was a passage well known to the Israelites, for they repeated it at least twice a day, in the morning and evening prayers. This is the first of the commandments, the summary and culmination of all the others.

Centuries later, when a scribe approached Jesus and asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” the Lord replied in the same words. “The Christian faith,” Pope Benedict XVI explains, “by placing love at the center, has taken on what was the core of Israel’s faith, giving it at the same time a new depth and breadth. In fact, the believing Israelite prays every day with the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which, as is well known, sum up the core of his life: ‘Listen, O Israel: the Lord our God is one. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength’ (Dt 6:4-5). Jesus, making the two a single commandment, united this commandment of love of God with that of love of neighbour, contained in the Book of Leviticus:”You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev 19:18; cf. Mk 12:29-31). And since it is God who first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is no longer just a “commandment” but the response to the gift of love, with which it comes to meet us.

“In a world in which the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance and even with the obligation of hatred and violence,” the Pope summarizes in the first paragraphs of the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, “this is a message of great relevance and with a very concrete meaning.”

Today this request of our Creator and Redeemer comes anew to our souls. The Lord asks us to love him with works and with the affection of our hearts, that every day we know better that path towards the Trinity that is the Most Holy Humanity of Jesus, and that we manifest our love with concrete acts of charity towards our neighbour.

With the Incarnation of the Word and his death on the Cross, God’s love for men and women has taken on an impressive significance. “In Jesus Christ, God himself goes after the ‘lost sheep’, suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who seeks the drachma, of the father who goes out to meet the prodigal son and embraces him, it is not just a matter of mere words, but is the explanation of his own being and action. In his death on the Cross this turning of God against himself is realized, in giving himself to give new life to man and to save him: this is love in its most radical form. To look at the pierced side of Christ, of which John speaks (cf. Jn 19:37), helps us to understand (…) that”God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there, on the Cross, that this truth can be contemplated.”

For our part, we say to the Lord that we wish to reciprocate generously: My God, teach me to love you; or, in the words of our Father: Lord, may he have weight and measure in everything … except in Love. It fills us with confidence to know that, in order for us to love him, God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. In this way, within our littleness, we will be able to respond to God’s immense tenderness for each and every one of us.

To be moved to love, we must consider God’s love for us.

“We have believed in God’s love: in this way the Christian can express the fundamental choice of his life. One does not begin to be a Christian,” Benedict XVI explains, “by an ethical decision or by a great idea, but by the encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives a new horizon to life and, with it, a decisive orientation.”

To be moved to love, we must often consider the concrete manifestations of God’s love for each one of us. This is what the Psalmist does with the words that the Church presents today in the Responsorial Psalm: I love you, Lord, my fortress (…), my God, my rock where I take refuge, my shield, the strength of my salvation, my fortress. This Psalm is a song of thanksgiving that David addresses to God to thank him for the many gifts he has received throughout his life. The Lord delivered him from his enemies, especially from the hands of Saul; he gave him victory over the Gentile peoples; he gave him back Jerusalem after he had to abandon it because of the insurrection of his son Absalom. … David always found support and help in God. Hence his recognition and his love: I love you, Lord, my strength. He was always his ally: refuge, safe rock, protective shield …

Each one of us can repeat these same words. What determines our lives, what drives away darkness and sadness, is the fact that God loves us. This reality fills our hearts with hope and consolation. In this God’s love was manifested among us: that God sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we might receive life through him. This is what love consists of: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a scapegoat for our sins. The Incarnation is the supreme revelation of God’s predilection for each of his children. But this love preexisted every manifestation from eternity: with eternal love I love you, the Lord tells us through the mouth of Jeremiah.

“The human being,” Benedict XVI writes in his second encyclical, “needs unconditional love. He needs that certainty which makes him say: ‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present, nor future, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature will be able to separate us from the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 8:38-39). If there is this absolute love with its absolute certainty, then - only then - is man ‘redeemed’, whatever happens in his particular case. This is what is to be understood when we say that Jesus Christ has ‘redeemed’ us. Through him we are sure of God, of a God who is not a distant ‘first cause’ of the world, because his only-begotten Son became man and each one of us can say of him: ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me to the point of giving himself up for me’ (Gal 2:20)”.

When the time comes for the exam and we see that our correspondence has perhaps been diminished, we must not be discouraged. St. Josemaría teaches us to rest in the Lord, fostering in our souls a strong shock of love and pain, because in both ways we can and must manifest our desire to love God.

A jolt of love (…). I look at my life and, with sincerity, I see that I am nothing, that I am worthless, that I have nothing, that I can do nothing; moreover, that I am nothing!, but He is everything and, at the same time, He is mine, and I am His, because He does not reject me, because He has given Himself for me. Have you contemplated greater love?

And a jolt of pain, for I review my conduct, and I am amazed at the accumulation of my negligence (…). I am truly sorry for this behavior of mine, but it does not take away my peace. I prostrate myself before God, and I explain to Him clearly my situation. I immediately receive the assurance of His assistance, and I hear in the depths of my heart that He repeats to me slowly: Meus is you! (Is 43:1); I knew - and I know - what you are like, go ahead!

It cannot be otherwise. If we continually go to place ourselves in the presence of the Lord, our trust will increase, as we see that his Love and his call remain current: God does not tire of loving us.

Love for God must be manifested in charity towards one’s neighbour.

EVERYTHING we do for the Lord is only a trifle in the face of the immensity of his gift for us. God loves me … And the Apostle John writes: “Let us therefore love God, since God first loved us.” As if that were not enough, Jesus addresses each one of us, despite our undeniable miseries, to ask us as he did Peter: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”

“It is time to answer:”Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you!“, adding humbly: help me to love you more, increase my love!

If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, the Lord tells us in phrases that we repeat in the verse before the Gospel. Love asks for works: trust and abandonment of children, when we do not fully understand the meaning of the events that affect us or others; readiness to go to him always, and especially when we feel most in need of his grace and forgiveness; joyful gratitude for the gifts received; fidelity of children, wherever we find ourselves. … In every concrete situation of our lives, whatever it may be, God always wants us to be happy, because in every circumstance we can be faithful to the Lord.

We love God when we carefully comply with what is required by his commandments and the duties of state in the midst of the world that we have assumed throughout our existence; when we delicately avoid even the smallest opportunity to offend him; when we live charity in a thousand details with those who are closest to us and open our hearts to the needs of souls; and also when we know how to take care of those gestures that may seem small but that are full of delicacy and affection for the Lord: a genuflection well done before the Tabernacle or a bow of the head before the Cross, punctuality in the practices of piety, a glance at an image of Our Lady …

You are not far from the Kingdom of God, Jesus replied to the scribe at the end of the scene we contemplate today in the Gospel, when he saw that he had understood his teaching well. We children of God carry within us that Kingdom - which is a kingdom of justice, love and peace - and we want to make it a reality in the whole world. Often, however, we Christians have not been able to respond to this gift; sometimes we have lowered it, as if it were limited to almsgiving, soulless, cold; or we have reduced it to a more or less formulaic conduct of beneficence. This aberration was well expressed by the resigned complaint of a sick woman: here I am treated with charity, but my mother cared for me with affection. The love that is born of the Heart of Christ cannot give rise to this kind of distinction.

In order that this truth may be well placed in your heads, in a graphic way, I have preached on thousands of occasions that we do not possess one heart to love God, and another to love creatures: this poor heart of ours, made of flesh, loves with a human affection that, if it is united to the love of Christ, is also supernatural. This, and no other, is the charity that we must cultivate in the soul, which will lead us to discover in others the image of Our Lord.

Let us turn to the Blessed Virgin so that she may forge in every Christian the image of her Son. She will also teach us to have a faithful love for God, and a love congealed in works of service to others.