The greatest Commandment of all

Today’s gospel reading is about the Greatest Commandment. It is the heart of God’s law, which both Jews and Christians alike ought to embrace as the most important thing in their lives. You can find this passage in the Jewish Torah or in Christianity’s Holy Bible in Matt.22:43-40.

 34 When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them [a scholar of the law) tested him by asking, 36”Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? 37 He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and the first commandment. 39 The second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

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 A couple of months ago, I had dinner at the Marco Polo Plaza Hotel with the Israeli Ambassador to the Philippines, His Excellency Zvi A. Yapni and I asked him whether he prayed his “Shema.” He replied with a resounding yes and pointed out that all devout Jews are commanded to recite this prayer when they rise up in the morning and before they go to bed at night. So I recited the Shema in Hebrew and he was taken by surprise that I could say that prayer in his own language.

 Actually, you can get this prayer in Google, but to memorize it is another thing. In Hebrew it is prayed like this, “Š?ma?Yis?r??el ?d?n?y ?l?hênû ?d?n?y e??d. (Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.) All devout Jews were required by the Torah to pray this at least twice a day and 2,000 years later this is still a requirement for all Jews. As Catholics, we too have adopted the Ten Commandments that were handed down by Moses which is why we call the Jews our elder brethren. You can also read this in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 6:5.

 Love after all is a two-way street although more often than not it is a one-way street for us humans, especially when it comes to our love for our God because it is difficult to love a God that we do not see. First of all we must accept the reality that we were all made in the likeness of God; hence our souls do thirst for God’s love. Alas, too often we nourish our bodies with wine, women and song, and end up with a malnourished soul. This is because we do not take seriously what our Lord Jesus Christ told us in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

 As I pointed out, it is not easy to love God unless you know the types of love out there. Philosophers and theologians alike have identified the three types of love. The first is called Eros or human love. It is the attraction between two persons (in ancient times, it is usually between male and female), which is often described as sexual love or attraction. This is the love that brings two together and, in God’s way, gets married to become one in their offspring, born out of their marital union. This is the most common type of love that we humans understand and, more often than not, misuse as love, which is later renamed as “erotica.’

 The next type is Philia or filial love, which in Greek is love for a friend or brotherly or sisterly love. This was concocted by Aristotle to denote family love and even love of a community or even love of one’s people. Finally, there is Agape, which is the Love of God, the highest form of love as it is the love we have for the one who created us. To be able to love God through agape, one must develop a high sense of spirituality and understanding of our faith. We’ve said this many times that faith is a gift given to us by God the Father Himself. But more often than not, we fail to realize or recognize that this gift was already given to us, hence we cast God away for other types of love that we can readily find.

 In today’s modern world, we have moved further away from God and, worse of all, we have created other Gods to love or idolize … like for instance the love of money, the love of a girl, the love of material goods or worse, the love of oneself, which is called narcissism or vanity that destroys our perspective of loving others. In Exodus 20:5 God told Moses about loving other idols or God saying, “You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

 What’s a bit disturbing in this verse is that after you love God with all your heart, your soul and your mind or your strength and your neighbor as yourself, our Lord Jesus said, “You are not far from the kingdom.” That’s because in order for us to gain eternal life, one must eat his body and blood wholly present in the sacred host of the Holy Eucharist.

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