In answering the lawyer who questioned him, Jesus quotes the main part of the commandment God gave to Israel through Moses: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” We are to love God with all our being, nothing less. It is also a commandment, not a proposal or invitation. We must love God with all our being because that’s why He made us. It is our chief mission in life. We are made not for any love, but for the love of God. It is therefore the fulfilment of our humanity. Loving God cannot be a partial concern but all-consuming in every time and place. Whoever we are, whatever we do, whatever our obligations or relationships, our primary duty is to love God above all and with all and through all. If we are married, it is in and through marriage that we are to love God with all and above all; if we are single or celibate or widowed, we accept and embrace our state in life for the sake of loving God with all and above all.

Loving God brings unity and coherence to our lives and loves. It reconciles and harmonizes us and brings deep peace to our inmost self. No matter what ill or problem we have, we can bring it to God and make it serve our obedience to the commandment of loving Him through and in everything. Even in the most painful and overwhelming situations, we can turn to God in trust and surrender them to Him in love. This kind of love is tough and toilsome; it is defiant and determined; it is suffered and sorrowful; but for these very reasons, it is pure gold.

God can rightly ask this love of us because He has first loved us with all His heart and soul and mind and strength. Creating us was the first wave of that love for us. The Cross is the second and final wave since, upon it, God poured out Himself completely in Christ to raise us from the death of our sins and, at the last, from the death of the grave. Through the Cross we have received the Holy Spirit, the Gift of divine Love in person. “Come down, o Love divine, seek Thou this soul of mine and visit it with thine own ardour glowing. O, Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear and kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.” The Spirit is the power we have received to be able to love God above all, with all and through all. He deposits within us the inexhaustible treasure of the love of God. So, when we are commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, we have the power, we have the reserves to do so. It is God’s love in us with which we return love to Him. Perhaps we could say that He “en-lovens” us to be able to love Him with divine love itself.

What I am describing here is not something to consider as strange or alien to our humanity. God knows and, if we are thinking straight, weshould also know that our humanity’s true and lasting fulfilment can only be found in being loved by God and in loving God. The sin within and around us dulls and blinds us to the love of God. We get distracted by earthly loves. No matter how legitimate many of them may be, and however deeply we may experience them, they cannot fulfil our greatest capacity to love. And if we love our earthly loves more than we love God then, as Jesus says in the Gospel, we are not worthy of Him. The issue is not to deny our genuine earthly loves, but to love them and purify them from within the love of God. The love of a spouse, a child, a friend is surely a beautiful thing, but it cannot end either in them or in us. For if we truly love them, we will want them to come to know and love God. Any true love will seek to open the beloved out to the love of God. It will seek to invest the beloved with the love of God and bring both me and my beloved to find the fulfilment of our love in the love of God. We are to love our neighbour as ourself precisely because we must not love them as if they were God, nor must we love ourselves as if we were God. If our love remains merely human, it must eventually die because that is the fate of the merely human. But if our human love becomes the springboard, the doorway, the launch pad to reach up and out to the love of God, then we are allowing the trajectory of our love for our loved ones to reach heaven, to live for ever. Most certainly we prove our love for God in loving our neighbour, but we cannot say that love for our neighbour is just the same as our love for God. It may prove that love, but it is not that love, because our neighbour is not God.

And so, the greatest commandment is to love God. It is the greatest thing any human being can do, as the martyrs show us. The love of God should be our obsession, our constant motivation, our choicest prize and goal. When Moses conveyed to Israel the great commandment of love, he added that its words “shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” So, when you get up in the morning, let not your first thoughts be about the many things you have to do and get organized. Instead, turn first to the Lord and tell Him that you will do all you can today to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and ask Him to enkindle His Spirit in you to do it. Teach the love of God diligently to your children and grandchildren. It will ground them in God and they will love you for it. Talk about it at home together, talk about it with friends when you walk by the way. Give to the love of God the primacy and the supremacy in your heart, mind, soul, body, home and activity. Remember, too, that the Lord commands us to do this because He knows that it is the royal road to authentic and lasting happiness for us all. Don’t get trapped in the fake priorities and values with which consumerist and materialistic propaganda bombards you and your families. Assert with courage and clarity that the love of God comes first in everything because, after all, that love has put you first. Keep the Cross of Jesus to the front of mind and heart for it is the proof of God’s love for you. And may His love help us all to obey gladly His command to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength, until we see Him, face to face. Let us fall in love with God.