The Greatest Commandment: To LOVE God and Neighbor

To love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves summarizes the whole message of the scripture. This is the message of which God wants us to understand, believe, and live everyday – that life is all about loving God and others before anything else. 
 
So how do we love God will all our heart, with all our understanding, and with all our strength? This simply tells us that to love God means to give our everything, our whole being, our whole selves, our whole person – heart, mind, our every energy. 
 
God is the centrifugal force that brings us all together in this life. We are called towards God. We all move towards Him. 
 
God is our destiny. God is our eternity. God is our beginning, the Alpha and the Omega, where we all come from, and will eventually return. That is why loving Him entails nothing more than what we are, who we are, and what we have. Everything belongs to God. Therefore, everything is of God. This means that everything that we do, think or say must be to worship God. Our every breath. Our every step. Every word we utter. Every song we sing. Every dance we perform. Every decision that we take. Every achievement that we receive. Everything we owe to God. Everything, then, should be our way of worshiping God, our way of loving Him.
 
The other commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is a simple commandment but has too many interpretations. The question, then is, “who is my neighbor?” 
 
Our usual interpretation of neighbor is someone who lives close to our houses, or simply close to us. But Jesus tells us that a neighbor is someone who’s in need. Anyone, therefore, whether close to us or not is our neighbor. 
 
To love our neighbor, then, as ourselves requires a lot of patience, compassion, and self-denial.
 
 The easy part of loving our neighbor is when that neighbor is our friend or simply close to us. We can easily relate to these people and in fact we can even live with them every day. We can easily accept their misbehaviors, and forgive their mistakes and faults. That is easy. For how can we not love those who are good to us? Isn’t it simply correct to love those who love us? 
 
But it’s different when a neighbor is our enemy - not related to us, and not close to us. That is not easy. It’s hard to see the good things in that person, for example. It’s hard to recognize the beauty of caring in this situation. It is like putting yourself inside the room where there are a lot of people who are not familiar to you – you cannot freely move. In a sense, loving those who are our enemies, those who are not part of our circle takes an extra effort. 
 
And so, Jesus reminds us in this gospel that to love our neighbor means loving those who are familiar and those unfamiliar to us. Loving our neighbor means being inclusive, welcoming, accepting to whoever needs our love, our attention, compassion, regardless of ethnicity, race, nationality, faith, culture, and the likes. 
 
In the end, what truly counts in this life is our effort and commitment to love. For what will be the measure of our life in this world if we have not loved? Let us remember that whatever one we achieve in this life will remain a failure and a loss if we have not loved. Loving God and loving our neighbor takes a lot of responsibility for us. May we live everyday not in hatred or any other sinfulness but in love. That is the secret in life. That is what makes us truly God’s children.
-Fr. Rockmoore M. Saniel, OMI