We use the word love for an extraordinary range of things.
We love God. We love our family. We love a good Sunday lunch.
Some people apparently love running.
The same word is doing quite a lot of work.
So when Jesus says today: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… and your neighbour as yourself,” we need to know what He means.
Because Christ is not telling us merely to feel warm towards God and generally try to be pleasant to everybody else.
Biblical love is much more solid than that. And the first reading shows us.
God says: Do not mistreat the stranger.
Do not take advantage of the widow or the orphan.
If you lend money to somebody poor, do not exploit their poverty.
If you take someone’s cloak as security, give it back before nightfall.
That last one sounds rather remote until we understand it.
For a poor person, the cloak was not merely something fashionable to throw over the shoulders.
It was also the blanket at night.
God is effectively saying: “Yes, they owe you something. Yes, you may even have the law on your side. But do not leave a poor person shivering just because you can.”
That is love. Suddenly it is much less sentimental.
Love becomes very concrete when somebody is inconvenient.
It is easy enough to love humanity in general.
Humanity in general does not ring you at an awkward time.
Humanity in general does not leave the kitchen in a state.
Humanity in general does not irritate you repeatedly in exactly the same way.
It is particular people who test whether love is real.
And Jesus joins this directly to the love of God.
The Pharisee asks for the greatest commandment.
Jesus gives him two. Not because He has forgotten how to count.
Because the two belong together.
If we truly love God, then we begin to see other people differently.
The stranger is no longer simply “not one of us”.
The poor person is not merely a problem.
The difficult person is not merely an irritation.
Every person stands before us as someone made by God, known by God, and called by God.
That does not mean approving everything everybody does.
Christian love is not pretending that right and wrong do not matter.
Sometimes love has to correct. Sometimes love has to say no.
Sometimes charity requires truth which somebody would rather not hear.
But even then, we do not get permission to despise the person.
That is difficult.
Which is why the first commandment comes first:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart.”
We cannot manufacture Christian charity simply by trying harder to be nice.
We have to receive it from God.
Saint Paul says to the Thessalonians that they “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”
They turned. Christian life always involves turning away from something in order to turn towards Someone.
And idols are not only little statues in pagan temples.
An idol is anything which begins to occupy the place that belongs to God.
Money can do it. Success can do it. Comfort can do it.
Even being proved right can become an idol.
We can win the argument and lose charity completely.
We can be perfectly correct and thoroughly unpleasant about it.
There is not much triumph in that.
To love God with all the heart means there cannot be a locked room inside us with a sign saying: “Everything is Yours, Lord — except this.”
Everything else, Lord, by all means.
Jesus says all.
And here is the wonderful thing: God does not ask for the whole heart because He wants to impoverish us.
He asks for the whole heart because the heart was made for Him.
When God is in His proper place, other things begin to find their proper place as well.
Money becomes something to use rather than worship.
Work becomes service rather than identity.
Other people cease to be rivals, possessions or inconveniences.
And love becomes possible. Not easy. Possible.
That is why these two commandments sum up the whole Law.
Love God above everything.
Then, because you belong to Him, learn to love those who belong to Him too.
And the test is often very ordinary.
The person at home who needs patience.
The neighbour who needs help.
The person we have avoided.
The person whose weakness we could exploit.
The lonely person nobody notices.
The person who needs forgiveness rather than another reminder of what they did.
Exodus brings love down from the clouds and puts it beside a poor person trying to keep warm through the night.
Jesus takes that same love and tells us: This is the heart of religion.
Love God entirely.
And let that love become visible in the way you treat the person beside you.
Because in the end, we cannot say that God has our whole heart while deliberately withholding charity from those whom He loves.
And the hope is that God never asks us to love from an empty heart.
At this Mass, He loves us first. He speaks to us. He gives Himself to us.
He pours grace into lives which are still unfinished.
And then He sends us back into the world to give away something of what we have received.
Love God.
Love your neighbour.
Simple enough to remember.
A lifetime to live.
