Love or law? This is the question that is being posed to me as I ponder on today’s readings. In the first reading, we are shown the law of Moses: “The Lord our God is one God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The Gospel proclamation elaborates this same law: Love your neighbour as yourself.

Can love and law really coexist? The law makes up rules, mandates, orders whereas love goes beyond boundaries, beyond reasons, beyond sense. In today’s Gospel proclamation, the Lord Jesus says that the two greatest commandments on earth revolve around love. It almost seems impossible to think that we are commanded, or ordered, to love. Yet, that is what being a Christian is about. It is about loving our brothers and sisters in their darkest moments, it is about reaching out to a broken world who can only see their own sin, it is about taking the unconditional love of God our Father into every nook and cranny that it can seep into.

The commandments in question work in unison. If we love the Lord with the entirety of our being, we must love our neighbour in that same regard. One cannot love God yet hate their brother or sister, nor can one love their brother or sister and hate God. Like the scales of justice, the two commandments beautifully balance out a Christian’s perspective of life.

As I read the Responsorial Psalm, I am reminded that King David is an example of how when one does not balance love of God and neighbour, the results can be catastrophic, and the repercussions could last generations. His zeal for the Lord was boundless, yet he harboured sin in his own heart, causing him to ultimately kill those who stood in the way of his plans. We may not do this through murder, but sometimes our words and actions destroy the people around us, when we are focused solely on reaching our selfish goals. Perhaps at office we speak ill of our colleagues, to snatch a promotion, or we gossip with our neighbours to show that we are perfect. We may even compare our prayer lives or acts of charity to say that we are more prayerful or charitable than others.

It is our Christian duty to actively choose love over hate, over pride, over self in every situation. It does not mean becoming a doormat but letting our Lord Jesus take control and bring His love into the situations of our day. By making this conscious choice daily, we are allowing more of the love of the Lord to spread to our dark world — and what joy to have been a little light that sparked a flame!

Abba Father, let my love for you pour out into those around me that you may be glorified – Amen.