Last week, we heard one kind of “test” for Jesus from the Pharisees—the kind of test that cannot be rightly answered on its own terms. Today we hear a different kind of “test” from a scholar of the law. We can discern the difference in tone immediately from the frank way in which the Lord responds. This is a question from an honest student seeking the truth from a master—the kind of question known well in the rabbinical tradition as well as in the later tradition of Catholic scholasticism that emerged in the medieval universities. So we might note right at the start that Jesus welcomes this opportunity for teaching and conversation; this is the kind of question that opens up the truth, not the kind of question that seeks to manipulate it for personal or political advantage.
The response, what has sometimes been called the “summary of the law,” is not, as some modern Christians might imagine, some great innovation or departure from the Old Testament. Our Lord’s response comes straight from Scripture; and his way of summarizing Scripture further draws from certain teachings of the rabbis on the law. If the Decalogue—the Ten Commandments—represents the basic summary of divine and natural law, this summary is a further crystallization of the “two tablets” of the Decalogue. After all, the first three commandments primarily concern the vertical dimension, or our relationship with God. The final seven concern our relationship with other people and more broadly with the created order. That’s love of God and love of neighbor.
Despite the recurring modern characterizations of the Old Testament as harsh and impersonal, its reality is much richer. Jesus did not do away with the Law and replace it with love. He revealed more deeply that the heart of the law was love all along.
The idea that law and love are so closely intertwined will seem a “hard saying” for many modern Christians, especially Americans. We do not like law, except maybe when it happens to allow us to get what we want. I recently re-watched the classic Disney film Aladdin, partly because my daughter was reading a version of the older tale from the 1001 Nights. I’m hardly the first to observe this, but what I always thought was a fun story with catchy tunes seemed to me now a sad window into the American obsession with individual autonomy. Who is the villain in that story? Not just an evil magician, but the law. The moral of the story, in the end, seems to be that the only way to happiness is to do whatever you want and to defy any mean old “rules” that stand in the way. Although Aladdin may be more roguishly handsome and charming than the evil vizier, I wonder if he is really very different in character. When “love” means anarchy and lies, putting a whole country at risk for the sake of one person’s romantic desire, it is hard to see how it is different from pure ambition for power.
For that is what most people today mean by love, is it not? Sure, it means a feeling of some sort, an attraction. But ultimately it is about power: the power to get what you want, when you want it, how you want it, no matter what institutions, what public goods, what natural biological principles stand in the way. We should probably reduce the phrase “love is love” to the phrase “love is power,” which can further be reduced to “power is will,” which can only ever come down to the nihilistic idea that truth and beauty and goodness are what they are because those with the power say so.
Love is the great commandment. It is the supreme law. If love were, according to the biblical imagination, merely some passing feeling, it would be absurd to command it. But love here is, before anything else, an act of the will—a rational decision to value the good of another over and above, or at the very least alongside, one’s own good.
It is only following this basic commitment that it makes any sense to speak of heart and soul. The heart is, in the ancient world, the seat of emotion. So love here isn’t meant to exclude feeling. The most perfect and complete love brings with it the whole of the human person. Feeling cannot be commanded, but it can be formed and molded both by will and by practice.
It’s worth inserting here a little reminder about the Decalogue itself—a reminder often picked up by the rabbis and commentators of the tradition. The law is about action—you shall not steal; you shall not commit adultery. But it is also about the desires that give rise to action—you shall not covet your neighbor’s goods; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. The complete moral life is not simply one where we do the right thing; it is also one where we want to do the right thing, where we do not even desire something evil. This principle further points to the Catholic understanding of true freedom. The modern world thinks of freedom merely as a choice between opposites—to do one thing or another. But Christians, following the law, have always understood that the highest freedom is the unconstrained power to do the good—that is, I am most free when I do what is right without even bothering with thoughts about evil. Frankly, I think anyone who has ever struggled with addiction understands this intuitively. When we speak about the saints in heaven being unable to sin, that is what we mean; it is not the removal of power, but the perfection of power.
The entirety of the law then is motivated not by some arbitrary will to power, but by God’s intention to draw us into his infinite and eternal love. Law that stems from arbitrary authority—that says merely do this “because I say so”—is indeed often oppressive insofar as it is irrational. But the law of the gospel is centered on responding in love to the God who loved us first. So even when we do not fully understand the “why” of a rule, we do it not out of some servile sense of obedience, but out of love. I know that my Lord loves me. He gave his life for me. His law is, like everything else about him, fully devoted to my good.
Having said this, we should continue with the logic of our Lord’s words. Just as there is no competition between law and love, there is no competition between the love of God and the love of neighbor. There is a real priority. Love of neighbor—what we might summarize under the heading of Catholic social teaching, matters of justice, and so on—is incoherent apart from the love of God. This is why progressive Christianity, by placing the second commandment over and above the first, only becomes a more strident and self-righteous version of secular progressivism. But the alternative conservatism that it often provokes is not much better; we dare not read today’s passage from Exodus about the stranger and the widow, borrowing and lending, and act as if biblical religion can be reduced to some combination of orthodoxy and individual responsibility.
The law of love is personal, because God is personal, and he made us as persons. It is neither primarily feeling nor abstract intellectual assent; it is encounter. No wonder that both the law and the prophets—both their intellectual and their moral demands—come together in their concern for worship. The love of God and of neighbor—the “law of the gospel”—likewise flows from and with the sacrament of charity, the most holy Eucharist, where we most directly encounter Jesus in this “vale of tears.” How can we know ourselves, and one another, until we know him? How can we know how to love him if we do not spend time with him in the place where he has promised to be?
Let us go then to Calvary, to the altar, to the sacred heart that beats with love for us. There we can know what it means to be loved. There we can take upon ourselves the “sweet yoke” of Christ’s law, which is nothing more and nothing less than the charity of the triune God.