Love: God, Ourselves, Others

This morning I am reading from the Gospel of Mark, and thinking about our call to love God and each other.

Mark 12:28-33 NIV:
[28] "One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

[29] “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. [30] Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ [31] The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

[32] “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. [33] To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

It is an interesting thing, to be commanded to love God, for that goes against the popular idea that love is a feeling. The idea that we can choose to love, work on love and love with more than our emotions is somewhat foreign to our modern ideas on love. In reading this, one could feel like this type of commanded love is not love at all, but rather coerced feeling, but that is a wrong assumption.

God is calling us to relationship with Him, first and foremost. It is in this place of relationship that we learn how to love Him with our whole being. This loving with our heart, soul, mind and strength includes our emotions, but adds to it our thoughts, our actions, our inner being, everything we are, and everything we do. This is not something we can accomplish with simple following of rules, but something we internalize and we meld into our very core.

The Lord wants our relationship and our love first and foremost, and that is what Jesus is saying here. Our relationship with Him should be first before all others. Our relationship with Him becomes the foundation for all others. It is in relationship with Him that we discover our true identity, learning to love ourselves, and from that place of identity we are able to interact with all others (our neighbors). It is in relationship with Him that we see the value of all others, and understand that they are also God's chosen, the ones He loves, and from that place we learn to love them like we love ourselves.

Finally, the Lords commands, are not suggestions for good lives, although they have that effect. They are the best path forward, the best and only way for our fulfillment and finding our true purpose. They are meant to be the foundation upon which we interact with each other. They are meant to guide us, give us purpose and keep us healthy in our relationships with others, by way of our relationship with God. I think it is safe to say that if we have a healthy, loving relationship with God, we are far more likely to have healthy loving relationships with others.

There is great wisdom in these few verses, and we would be well counseled to dive deep into them and discover how we can more effectively live them out in our lives. We are called to love God and to love others, as Jesus says in John 13:34-35: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. [35] By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” We are called to be examples to the world of Love, love for God, His love for us, and our love for one another. Let us learn to love with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength.