The greatest commandment

A word for the week

If you could reduce the whole of what God asks to a single thing, what would it be? People have tried to answer that for as long as there has been religion, usually by making the list longer, not shorter. A scribe puts the question to Jesus directly: of all the commandments, which is the greatest? And Jesus does not hedge or say it cannot be reduced. He answers at once, and he ties the whole of the law into one knot.

The greatest, he says, is this: hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength. It is the old confession every faithful Jew said daily, and Jesus puts it first: love God with everything you are, all of you, held back nowhere. That is the first and greatest command. But then, without being asked for a second, he gives one anyway, because he knows the first is not safe alone. The second is like it, he says: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And then the line that binds them: there is no other commandment greater than these.

Notice he refuses to separate them. He was asked for one and gave two, because in his teaching you cannot pull them apart. Love of God that does not become love of neighbor is a lie, a private glow that never reaches a single actual person. And love of neighbor with no love of God underneath it slowly runs dry, becomes duty, becomes exhausting, because it has no source to draw from. The two are one thing seen from two sides. You love God, and it spills onto the people around you; you love the people around you, and it turns out you were loving God.

And see how total it is. Heart, soul, mind, strength. Not just warm feelings, not just correct beliefs. Your heart, your inner life; your soul, your very self; your mind, your actual thinking; your strength, your body and your effort. God does not want a slice of you. He wants all of you, pointed toward him, and then poured out on the people he made. This is not a rule among rules. It is the single thing all the other rules were only ever trying to protect.

The scribe, hearing it, agrees warmly, and says loving God and neighbor is worth more than all the sacrifices in the temple. And Jesus tells him: you are not far from the kingdom of God. Not far. He is close, because he has seen that the whole of it comes down to love, and not to the apparatus of religion. That is a good word for anyone who has ever felt buried under the weight of trying to be good. It is simpler than you feared, and harder than you hoped. Love God with all you are. Love the person in front of you as yourself. Everything else is commentary.