30TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, YEAR A: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE!

Kel. 22:21-27; Mzm. 18:2-3a,3bc-4,47,51ab; 1Tes. 1:5c-10; Mat. 22:34-40.

When people hear Our Lord’s teaching (Mt 22:34-40) , that loving God and neighbour is the greatest commandment, they might think Jesus was a proto-hippie. After all, He was countercultural, into peace, talked universal love. Add long hair and a beard, and all that’s missing is the guitar…

However, there’s a lot more going on in our Gospel than the utopianism of the ’67 Summer of Love, which was big on intimacy and good feelings but rather vague on the details of the good life. After singing the chorus of “All You Need Is Love” many times some probably thought there was nothing more to be said. Love is, after all, impassioned, impulsive, even chaotic…

Today, Jesus takes two commandments, from two different Old Testament books (Deut 6:5; Lev 19:18), knits them together as one, and promotes them to top commandment. Yet He maintains that there is a certain order between them: loving God comes first, then loving self, and loving neighbour comes third or a close equal-second. St Thomas Aquinas takes this further, asking why we should love in that order; whether we should prefer those closest to us or those who are best; whether we should love children or parents more; whether the order of charity endures in the afterlife; and so on.[1] Not all loves are equal, then. Some have priority, at least in some circumstances. Some are less worthy, over-sentimental, controlling. All of which means there is some logic to love after all, some order amidst the emotional chaos.

It might sound rather mathematical, even autistic, to attempt to bring order into the madness of love. But at the heart of Jesus’ teaching was a second affective truth. We love God first and foremost because He is the why of everything else, the why of the lover, of the beloved, of the love. When His love inspires ours, it leads us to love ourselves in all humility, and our fellows also. We care even for the stranger. But we rightly consider some our intimates, our ‘nearest and dearest’. Someone who says she loves everyone equally does indeed love everyone equally – because she loves no-one. Love includes preference. And if people in pandemics think loving health comes before everything else, or that loving the economy comes next, Jesus has news for them: there are some things that matter as much or more!

Thirdly, attending closely to today’s text we notice that loving God doesn’t just come first: it demands “all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind”. So it’s not just about feelings, like hippie love. Important as feelings are, we must be sure to love the right persons or things, in the right ways. Godly love draws the whole person, intellect and will, emotions and beliefs. To others we give our most, or our much, but to God we give our all. Then, paradoxically, having given God all our love, our heart is enlarged to love many others, and better, and more…

When people hear today’s Gospel, most miss what Jesus says after He gives the double commandment, but here lies a fourth takeaway: “On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also,” He says. Once love is our ‘fundamental option’, our ‘strategic plan’, our ‘guiding paradigm’, step 2 is nutting out with our ‘heart and soul and mind’ the consequences for daily life. The love commandment doesn’t render Scripture and Tradition, or law and prophecy, null and void. Rather, love inspires, informs, interprets and applies them. What the hippie love of the Beatles missed is that big things like faith, hope and love need little, everyday expressions. So we need guidance for doing love amidst the complexities of life, about the logic of loving big and well, in the little things.


So there’s an order of loving, and God comes first, then ourselves and our fellows, and this affects the whole person, the whole of life, and must be expressed in deeds. Our other readings today give us some pointers on what sorts of deeds. No violence, exploitation, prejudice, God says to Moses today (Ex 22:20-26). You are Fratelli Tutti, all sisters and brothers, all in this together. So care for the widow and orphan, the poor and vulnerable, the voiceless and disappeared. Our love – our voices – should make them seen and heard, make them the neighbours we love as ourselves.

Throughout the Bible God praises those who hear the cries of the poor and the demands of righteousness, and deplores those who do not.[2] When we love with heart and soul and mind, the right things in the right order, we can do so much that is good for the voiceless and for others. Once we have those things straight, we can indeed sing with our lives All You Need Is Love.