The learned teacher in question bucked the trend of scribal hostility toward Jesus for he genuinely wanted to establish the ground for righteous behaviour. To appreciate where this concern was coming from, note that the Jewish moral landscape is planted thick with laws, 613 (mitzvot) to be precise, consisting of 365 prohibitions (one for every day of the year) and 248 prescriptions (for the bones and significant organs in the body). For a devout Jew, relationship is best demarcated by legal language. Thus, they would constantly debate amongst themselves which of the laws would rank the highest. The genius of Jesus was to combine two strands of the traditions, the essential “Shema” from Deuteronomy (Dt 6:5) and the other taken from Leviticus (Lv 19:18). In other words, the fundamental prayer which every pious Jew will recite twice a day becomes the impetus for the love of one’s neighbour. Love God to love others.
The way of loving as prescribed by Jesus is best understood through the Cross. Note that while the Lord seemed to have placed on par the two commandments, still there is a hierarchy that we must never lose sight of. It is to love God first and to love our neighbour second. This ranking is central to the teaching of Christ because the love of God is the fertile soil for the love of others to sprout.
To love God without loving our neighbour is a form of “disincarnated” love. In essence, love is sacramental because it cannot exist in the abstract. Instead it should be concretised or “embodied” as illustrated by one of the Gospel passages dedicated to the Last Things. In Matthew’s Last Judgement, Jesus will judge our love for Him based on our love for our brothers and sisters. We cannot claim to love God without loving the broken, the rejected and the condemned.
To love neighbour without loving God is merely philanthropy. It is noble and good but it is not enough. We are accustomed to social justice activism, and as such, we have come to equate the good we should be with the good we should do. However, doing good does not guarantee us a place in heaven. Heaven is not an automatic reward. We find it difficult to wrap our heads around such an assertion because it runs counter to an unquestioned assumption that willy-nilly, we will get to heaven. If Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men are to be believed, “And I know eventually we’ll be together, one sweet day”. In fact, when the world tries hard to marginalise God, it has no choice but to believe that doing good is good enough.
Heaven is not a “place” we have been taught to go to. Instead, it is relational. “I believe in the Communion of Saints” aptly captures the relationship that we have been invited to. Sanctity or saintliness is not as stand-offish as being set apart seems to suggest so. On the contrary, holiness is profoundly relational. Only in this way does heaven become figuratively a “place” because the Saints are in communion with Him who is the Lord of heaven and of earth. Under this perspective, one may safely define hell as the absence of relationship with God. Hell is not God’s rejection of us but rather our rejection of relationship with God. Hell is the absence of God.
If love draws us into communion, then the Cross is where love as relational makes the most sense. It gives meaning to the 2nd Reading in which Christ the High Priest establishes the only Covenant that is binding on God for eternity through the sacrifice of Himself, out of love for His Father. He also died out of love for others, for us as there is no love greater than to lay down one’s life for others. Unlike the High Priests who have to offer the holocaust every year, the offering of Christ is for all eternity. His sacrifice is the basis for our discipleship of love.
To appreciate this communion, we must understand what constitutes the love we are called to. In the Vulgate edition of the Bible, the Latin word “caritas” is the translation for the Greek “agape”. However, the English equivalent of “charity” has a rather restrictive meaning, narrowly defining it as benevolence to the poor. But love is more than just kindness. “Caritas” goes beyond the fuzzy feelings associated with love. In fact, its moral character requires that “caritas” must always be love in truth. This we observe in the 1st Reading. The Shema is also expressed through keeping His Laws and Commandments. This is not being “judgemental” but it would mean at times disagreeing with those who go against God’s laws as expressed through the Commandments, through natural law and through the moral teachings of the Church. Love cares for both the material welfare as well as the spiritual well-being of the other. The genius is to disagree without hating. This is indeed an uphill task.
This moral component of love necessarily leads to Calvary first before it arrives at the Resurrection. Our world is polarised by the sin of hatred. There are chasms created by our politics, economics, psychology, and even spirituality which can only be bridged by a discipleship of love as expressed by St Teresa of Kolkata. She found the paradox “that if one loves until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love”. We are not alone in this enterprise. Despite the struggles, the great multitude of saints continues to bid us to join them in the life-giving communion of love. The great figure of St Therese possibly captures the two dimensions of the discipleship of love, both the vertical and the horizontal. She loved God right down to what some would consider to be absurd minutiae as she continually sought ways and means to please Her Saviour. “It is true, I suffer a great deal—but do I suffer well? That is the question”. Her love for God knows no boundary because for her, “When one loves, one does not calculate”. In fact, her love for God was that profound that it flowed horizontally into her mission that “I will spend my heaven doing good on earth”. As we glide and slide into the final weeks of the liturgical year, the scribe’s question, and St Therese heavenly mission on earth both direct our attention to the perennial truth that the love God and neighbour are two sides of a coin. As promised by the Lord, we will be near the Kingdom of Heaven when our love for the Lord overflows into our love for the neighbour.
