You Shall Love

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

You wouldn’t think twenty-seven words from Matthew: 22-37-39 would be so difficult  to weave into our moral and ethical fabric:

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. … You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And yet, they are so challenging in their simplicity. We don’t get a pass if we don’t happen to worship the same God as our widowed mother-in-law who wants to return to her native land. We don’t get a pass in those situations where it doesn’t seem God is aware of our existence because we are in so much pain or despair. As a priest friend once said, if we get those commandments right, we don’t have to worry about much else.

Imagine what the Pharisees thought at Jesus’s answer. In a way, he laid waste to hundreds and hundreds of laws. He even dared to synopsize the ten commandments! Who was this guy to think he could edit all those rules into twenty-seven words?

With apologies to Jesus and Mark and my priest friend, I think we can boil down even further those two greatest commandments, those twenty-seven challenging words. We only need three words to do as God commands, the first three words of the two sentences above:

 You shall love.