When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them (a scholar of the law) tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and will all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it : You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
The Word in other words
When I was in India, I heard this story about Mahatma Gandhi. He once boarded a train and, as the train started to move, one of his sandals fell on the track. People looked at him as he took off the other sandal and threw it as closely as possible to the first one. Someone asked him why he did it, and he answered, "Anyone who will find the first sandal can find the pair and so he can wear them."
In a way, it has some relation to our call to love. We cannot love God without loving our neighbor, as St. John the Evangelist said, and vice versa, we cannot love our neighbor without loving God. As in Gandhi's case, one cannot wear a sandal only on one foot and still look normal, so one needs the other sandal, too.
In our gospel today, 'love' is indeed the most important word, but notice how many times the word "ALL" has been used. God will not agree to a half-hearted situation. God wants us to love him with ALL we have and ALL we are, above all things and in all things. ALL or nothing. No one and nothing is excluded from his love. If ever we love anybody or anything else, we should love ALL only in God and only next to God.
God's commandment is not a compulsion but a GRACE for us who believe in him. We can love God only because he has made us for love and as an overflow of his love and life. It is therefore God himself who actually draws us to his love. When we know God, we will be surprised that we cannot but love him and find no greater joy than in doing so. And when we truly love God, as in Gandhi's sandals, we also learn to love ALL that God loves, not only all our brothers and sisters, but also the environment that surround us.
- Fr. Carlos Lariosa, SVD (Radio Veritas Asia, QC)
