The
Church is currently in Ordinary time, from ordinal numbers, or ranking things
in the sequence in which they occur: first, second, third; gold medal, silver
medal, bronze medal. These are all the days that are not tied to Christmas
(Advent, Christmastide, Epiphanytide) or Easter (Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide,
Ascensiontide, Pentecost).
But
when Jesus speaks of the first and second commandments, he is not speaking of
ordinal numbers. By ‘protos,’ he means the charge from which all other
instruction originates and against which it is measured for likeness. By
‘deuteros,’ he means a second telling of the same thing—that is, ‘to put it
another way...’—not a subsequent thing. (Exodus, the second book of the Law of
Moses, tells how God brought his people out of Egypt and gave them the Law;
Deuteronomy, the fifth book, presents a second giving of the Law, to the next
generation.)
The
charge is, love.
As
the sun is made to give light, and the rain to water the earth, so humans are
created to participate in love.
And
to do so fully involves heart (kardia) and soul (psuché) and mind (dianoia) and
strength (ischus).
Heart
means, our thoughts and feelings, and our ability to shepherd these. If your
thoughts and/or feelings towards someone else do not run to love, we are not
yet where God longs for us to be.
To
be clear, you may have been deeply hurt by another person, and we are not
claiming that this is okay and you need to embrace them. What we are saying is
that if your response to the one who has deeply wronged you is, ‘I hope they
burn in hell!’ rather than, ‘I am so sad at how they turned out, so far from
what God longed for them,’ then there is still work to be done. For your own
sake.
Soul
means the breath of life. We are clay of the earth (and our bodies will,
eventually, return to the earth from which we came) animated by the life of
God. Your life is a gift. And if we do not participate in that gift in love—if
we are overly defensive, or possessive, for example—we are not, yet, where God
longs for us to be.
Mind
refers to our ability to weigh a matter and reach conclusions. And if our
conclusion, in relation to another person, or kind of person, or group of
persons, is that they are deserving of only conditional or qualified love, then
we have reached the wrong conclusion.
Strength
refers to our ability to resist and overcome opposition. The strength available
to us fluctuates, over the course of a lifetime, or a day; but, we possess such
strength. And in a world that daily encourages us to hate or despise others, to
see others as a threat to our own life (as if anyone else could take away the
gift that God has given) we are called to exercise our strength to stand for
love.
And
if we do this, and if we acknowledge the ways in which we fail to do this and
seek the Love that we have denied, then we will participate in the kingdom of
God, which is the reign of Love.
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