The greatest
commandment
Mt 22, 34 – 12
In today's Gospel, a
scholar of the law asked Jesus: “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
As you
know, our God has 10 commandments - Three for God and seven
for man, but the greatest
commandment is: love God and love our
neighbor.
Coming
back to the Old Testament, in the book of Deuteronomy Moses said to Israel:
“The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your
God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with your all strength” (Dt 6:
4 – 13). Moving on to the New Testament
in the Last Supper, Jesus reminded his disciples: “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John
15:12)
First, God always desires us to give
him an important place in our life for him with all our love and our passion. Fr.
William (S.J) he writes: “God is madly in love with us”. Jesus loves us even
though we nailed him to the cross, so he also wants us to love him like that.
That is a passionate love
with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind. He wants us to
make him the first priority in whatever we do. It is only when we love him like
that, that we experience his love, his presence, and his strength to completely
trust and overcome the challenges in our life, especially in religious life.
Secondly,
God also wants us to love our neighbor. This is not an easy commandment to do. We can say that
we love God with all our heart, but we are not sure that we can live in harmony
and love our neighbor as they are. Nowadays, we recognize that our society
lacks humility and our morality goes down.
We are willing to hurt and even kill someone out of some crazy reasons.
We rely on money to solve our problems and our needs. We lose belief in our
neighbor, so we become stranger to each other. Moreover, cold - heartedness
became a serious decease in our society.
Looking back at our community, we are all invited to love, to share, to live,
to accept, to work, to study, to play together and become one in community. In
other words, we are invited to live in fraternity with God and let God act in
our community through Mass, liturgy of the hours, prayer and our work. Only God
can change us to become one and become better.
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