What it amounts to – 24 October 2014

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  (Matthew 22:34-40)

Steadily, across the spectrum of Christian faith around the world, and across immense obstacles, a huge shift seems to be happening.  On a perhaps superficial view it is a shift from exclusivism – that is to say, the assumption that you ought to believe the right things and in various ways conform – to a need for inclusivism – that we reduce the rules and remove the fences, and remember that God is the judge of people’s hearts and motives.  Exclusivism is a need to protect the faith and the church.  Inclusivism opens us to difference and risk, and often as not, the need to change.

There is another view, one that goes back to the Hebrew prophets.  It is to remember that God works, constantly, sometimes dramatically but usually not, sometimes with us but often despite us – God works to make all things new.  This is the creator tending and loving his creation.  It is the Spirit of the Risen Christ, continually inspiring and bringing us back to the way of Christ. 

The commandment which, said Jesus, is the greatest of all, the commandment which he said fulfils all the law and the prophets, is plain and simple:  You shall love the Lord your God… You shall love your neighbour.  That is the requirement.  It does not say that we must first be morally blameless or at any rate considerably improved.  It does not say that we must believe the right things.  It does not say that we must first fulfil various liturgical and canonical requirements.  It is a commandment to love – as though the love we have received and practise, however feeble, is what God sees and loves.

Neither is this love a matter of our emotions, of how we feel.  Jesus made that plain.  We often have to go on loving despite how we feel.  This cuts right through the terrible mess our culture and our generation has made of the word love.  Love is something I decide, a response to being loved unconditionally.  Pope Francis is one who apparently sees that the church needs to learn to love again – loving God and loving one’s neighbour are inseparable loves, mutually dependent.  When Mary McAleer, the former President of Ireland, who already had one child, found she was now expecting twins, she was as she puts it underwhelmed.  However was she going to split her love three ways?  In the event, she says, each child came with her/his own river of love.  Love is what we receive.  It is what changes us.  It is what brings us to God and to each other, and works all manner of miracles.