As a deacon, I am often asked, even by non-Catholics, about ‘the rules’. What is the rule about fasting before Mass? How often should a Catholic pray the rosary? What is the rule about being married on a beach instead of in a church? 

To me, these questions reflect a great respect for the Church and a desire to do what is right. And that’s  good. We should do our best to follow the practices of the Church, some of which have been in place since the time of the apostles. 

On the other hand, there are those for whom talking about religious rules and regulations is a way of life. I see this among both Catholics and Protestants. They seem mostly concerned about who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who’s saved and who’s not. If your beliefs about sanctification differ from mine, well that’s a reason for arguing. Anyone who has studied the history of the reformation and the religious wars can tell you that many bloody battles have been fought over these differences. 

This week and over the past few weeks Jesus was surrounded by exactly the same kind of religious arguments. That’s not surprising for the Law of Moses was of central importance to people of that time. People around him were arguing about whether or not it is right for religious people to pay taxes to the government, and who’s going to be married to whom in the resurrection. Then the Pharisees asked him one more question: “What is the most important of all the commandments in our religious laws?”

Jesus never hesitated. Perhaps he was relieved that someone had finally asked a question that had some substance to it. This was his immediate reply: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments”. 

It is interesting to note that while both these commandments can be found in the Old Testament, neither is in the Ten Commandments. In fact, one comes from the Book of Deuteronomy, the second from Leviticus. Jesus takes these two commandments and marries them together in a new and unique way. 

According to Jesus, what’s absolutely essential is loving God, and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Those three relationships — with God, with our neighbors, and with ourselves — sum up everything that’s ever been said or written about God’s will for the world.

So, what does it mean to love God? What does it mean to love anyone? The way that Jesus means it, at its heart love is not an emotion.  There are, of course, emotions, very strong emotions, connected with love; but, at its core, love is not an emotion. Emotions are a powerful part of being human, but emotions are not under our control. If love were based on emotions, what would happen when we find ourselves, as we often do, vexed or even angry with our spouses or kids, the ones we have promised to love, the ones whom we keep saying we do love? What happens we are angry with God? 

Love is a decision we make and have to re-make again and again. Love is a choice we make about whom and what we will allow to be important to us. Based on those decisions, our love then becomes something we do. To be in love is to give careful and personal attention to what is important to the one we love. 

What if loving God with all our hearts and souls and minds were to mean giving careful and personal attention to what is important to God, to listen to him?

What if we allowed God’s thoughts to be the truths we seek as we seek to understand life and how we should live it. What if we make his revealed truth be more important to us than anything else, more than our fears, our weaknesses, or our own changing emotional dispositions. On that foundation, our decision to love God would be not an emotion but an action: doing what God calls us to do. 

To do that would be to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Loving God means choosing to listen to what he says and then doing it.

Jesus says that the second of the greatest commandments is like the first. We are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. That’s the heart of what God wants. That’s why God put his creation together. That’s why we’re here. God wants a world in which all his human creatures receive and trust his love – and then share that love with each other.

Paradoxically, this commandment is one that most of us do obey, often unwittingly, and often destructively. Most of the time most of us do love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The problem is that much of the time we don’t love ourselves all that much, or as we should. 

So, we have to go back to the beginning: the first step in loving God is to listen to him, to trust what he says. Jesus’ central message is that God loves us.  And not just when we love Him back. “For God so loved the world.”

Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches that God causes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and causes his rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45). God doesn’t deal with us according to what we deserve but on the basis of who HE is. God is love, and God loves us. To believe in Jesus of Nazareth is to trust that we are loved.

When we trust that we are loved, then it follows that loving our neighbors as we love ourselves will create the kind of world God wants. When that happens, we have a glimpse of what it means for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is the basic message of the Kingdom of God: what God wants is a world in which the people he loves go on to love each other, living together in communities of love.

It’s not, finally, a question of rules. The three relationships — with God, with our neighbors, and with ourselves — sum up everything that’s ever been said or written about God’s will for the world.

Jesus says that life’s not about rules; it’s about loving relationships.

The title of this homily is from a sermon about love by Saint Augustine