The great commandment

A recent homily in the Quincy University Chapel 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.”

There is an apparent contradiction in the way this commandment is stated. How can you command someone to love? Love is supposed to be given freely, as a gift to the other person.

Here is a restatement of that first great commandment that suddenly popped into my head. It contains language that may sound vulgar, language that preachers should not use in a homily, but I think it expresses something that is important. It is important enough to break the rule about vulgar language.

Here it is, the way I would re-phrase the first great commandment.

“Love me, dammit.”

Literally, that statement expresses a truth: if you don’t love the Lord, you are damned. But the spirit of the statement is the spirit of someone pleading to be loved. The Lord is showing vulnerability and frustration in the statement. The statement is saying that the Lord wants and needs us to love him.

When you look at it that way, the word “commandment” does not quite express what is going on. It is a commandment in the sense that the Lord needs compliance from us more than that the Lord is demanding something from us.

Vulnerability is part of love. Our God is pleading for our love. Our God needs our love. That’s the way our God has made us.

Love is a two-way street. When God commands us to love, God is telling us that our response is just as important as what God just said. We are to approach God the way a child approaches a parent. There is the child’s dependence in the relationship, but there is also vulnerability on the part of the parent. The parent needs the child’s love. The child knows this, and it is a source of the child’s dignity.

The reason that every child’s life is precious is that every child has the dignity of being able to love God and that God needs that response from the child. Don’t mess with the child, because the child is talking with God, and God is listening.

We all have that dignity, even when we are a long way from childhood, and even when we may have done things that can destroy a relationship. God is just as vulnerable to us when we have sinned as when we are children who haven’t sinned yet. Jesus’s favorite statement was “God forgives you.”

So the next time we think about the great commandment, to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, we might re-phrase it: God is saying to us: “Love me, dammit.”