My song is love unknown

And audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 22: 34-40) should be a moment of joy, but casting a long shadow over it is the malice of the Pharisees whose intention is not remotely to discuss the greatest commandment but rather to disconcert Jesus. In this simple exchange we find a gulf between the interlocutors, despite their commonly held religion. Yet as Jesus says elsewhere, judge not according to appearances but according to justice.

On one side of this gulf stand the Pharisees who hold themselves to be the most faithful adherents of the Law. Yet they cannot see the wood for the trees, nor that the Law forbids the malice with which their question is put. They are, in other words, so absorbed in the pursuit of material conformity with the Law that it has become a tool in their hands – a tool for self-aggrandisement and a tool to exercise power over their neighbours, rather than their path towards God. Instead of directing them towards salvation, therefore, the Law condemns their entire modus operandi, and every step entangles them deeper in the mire.

Yet, let us not do as the Pharisees do and consider ourselves above their example. We could very well ask in what ways we are guilty of turning our religion into a means of self-service, rather than the service of God. Do we use it unconsciously to prop up our dissonant needs or wounded sense of self? Do we revel in material conformity with its exacting standards, forgetting that God calls us to a life of outward-turning love, rather than self-admiring perfection? Does it become in us a fashionable fetish, rather than a call to faithfulness? In other words, do we really follow Him, or have we unconsciously erected our own discreet idols in His place? Are we serving our Maker, or are we in some subtle way on the make? Only the quiet contemplation of God can illuminate who and what we are.

Standing on the other side of the gulf from the Pharisees is Jesus who answers their malicious questioning thus: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second commandment follows from it logically: You must love your neighbour as yourself, although as we know, Jesus gives a new commandment at the Last Supper: love one another as I have loved you – a commandment so sublime, we seldom mention it, and rarely if ever obey it.

How different would we be if indeed we followed these two commandments; if the law of our hearts and minds – our inner movements and our very thoughts - was that ray of light that plunges into us from the contemplation of the God of love? When we love something – this is the teaching of those supposedly bone-dry scholastics of the Middle Ages – we become like it. When we love God – truly loving Him above all other things – then that love becomes an ultimate law that reshapes us from the inside, not like a legal regulation; more like a mass of energy that brings other things under its all-powerful influence. When the love of God is our law, we are like planets to His sun.

Yet the idea of likeness is also important, because if in loving God we become like Him, we cannot but then love others, first because He loves them also and, second, because our hearts seek out in them what reminds us of our first love, God. Thus, it is easy to love a saint in whom we easily see God’s reflection, but a saint finds it easy to love the sinner, even the worst. We do not think enough on this implication of the law of love. So tribal do we become in defending our beleaguered patch of ground in this secular world, we forget that the worst among our enemies are the ones who are most deprived of God, and, therefore, the most to be pitied and indeed loved. Like the first law of thermal dynamics, truth is love and love is truth. We love one another because God has commanded it, and, nevertheless, the truth that everyone, even the worst of us, resembles God in some way, can become the cause of our love for them. The greater their fall from the truth of their being, the more they are to be pitied and loved. This is why the shepherd goes out and leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one that is lost.

Where I am, there must my servant be also, said Jesus in the gospel on the feast of St Lawrence. And the gospel of St John allows us to see exactly where Jesus is: for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

And so, the conclusion is clear: we must love even the malicious Pharisees who would cast the shadow of their ill-will across the pastures that might otherwise be lit by the love of God. Only light drives out darkness. Only God is their salvation and ours,

My saviour’s love to me,

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.