LOVE, OR ELSE?

We all know the commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and most of us have heard it explained by the parable of the Samaritan. But we tend to shy away from the fact that it’s the second commandment, because the first is, well, more bothering. I checked a few of the Greek words used in the passage from Matthew 22, and they are interesting. “Commandment” is entolè: an order or an instruction. So there is no getting away from it: we are ordered, or at least instructed, to love God. How, we ask (or we damn well should), can one be ordered to love anyone? Moreover, we are instructed to do so not in any half-hearted way, but with our kardia, our heart; our  psuchè, our breath, life, or soul; and our dianoia, our intelligence. What on earth (well, maybe not entirely on earth) are we to make of that?

Perhaps in the first place we’d do well to look at “love”. The Greek word used is agapao, which is used in the senses of “to have affection for, to care for” (for example, one’s children or one’s parents), “to honour” and very occasionally “to love” (a lover or a spouse). I remember reading a commentary on St Paul that interpreted the New Testament “love” as not so much an emotion as a being-there-for someone. The Samaritan, in that sense, “loved” the beaten traveller. So if we are told to “love” God it means we are to be there for Him, to care for Him as for a child or a parent, to be such that He can depend on us as they would. You can “love” a parent, or a sibling, you don’t much like on a daily basis: in a pinch you’d be there for them.

But why? Why would we do all that for someone whom we can’t even see, who half the time doesn’t answer our prayers, and who expects us to be “good” all the time? Because, when you get down to it and listen to the people who know Him better, in the first place He loved, and loves, us. (More about this in a minute.) Secondly, we can see Him: we can see Him in His Son, the celebration of Whose birth we are even now preparing. He sent His Son, part of Himself, not just to repair the broken toy we had made of the world, but to show us what He is like, in a form our tiny brains can handle. He couldn’t really have done more.

OK, that was then, a couple of thousand years back; but as the Carthusians I love to read (they are the guys who really spend time on this) tell me, He is still doing it, every hour of every day. Doesn’t much feel like it, we grouch. And the Carthusian says, “Don’t get Him wrong. Don’t confuse receiving His love with feeling His love. Sometimes you feel it, and that’s marvellous. But even when you don’t, you are still receiving it. And if you can get your kardia, your psuchè, and your dianoia round that, how can you not love Him back? He is giving you the example. However grouchy you are, however miserable you are, however much of a shit you are, He is there, loving you and hoping to God you will return His love.”

           

         So how about that entolè, that instruction? Perhaps it’s an instruction in a different sense. My father used to say that he thought moral laws were not so much like penal laws as like natural laws, showing the consequences of certain types of behaviour: if you stick your fingers into the candle-flame, you will get burnt and feel serious pain; if you jump off a cliff, you will fall until the rocks stop you and crack your spine, and you will die. Something like this perhaps applies also to the instruction to love God. It may be an instruction of the kind put in owner’s manuals: if you want your car to work properly, as the manufacturer intended, change the oil every 3,000 miles. If you want your life to work properly, as the Maker intended, accept Him as your parent and treat Him accordingly. Things will then tend to fall into place, often surprisingly. And who knows? You may even end up “loving” Him in the way we small humans normally understand it, as a vast feeling that lights our day.