How do you love God?
In the Jewish
tradition, the Shema is a central and indeed essential prayer: You
shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your strength, Moses tells the people in the Book of Deuteronomy,
for the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. Unlike other religions of the time, Judaism
was grounded in relationship with one and only one God, in a love that was to
transcend all others, intimate and singular.
King David knows this when he prays in Psalm 18, I love you, Lord, my strength.
The Hebrew word he uses is raham,
which denotes womb love, a mother’s love for the child she carries – an intimate
and singular connectedness. David recognizes and celebrates this intimate
connectedness with the Lord, expressing his own love in response to God’s
infinite love for him.
When, in Mark’s
Gospel, one of the scribes challenges Jesus to state which is the first of all the commandments, Jesus returns to the
Shema, the commandment to love God before all else. The scribe is familiar with the 613
commandments of the Torah, but Jesus foregrounds one only: the injunction to love God with our entire being, to focus on that intimate
connectedness in relationship that God seeks.
Such love is more important than laws, or sacrifices, or priestly
duties, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us: Jesus has
no need to offer sacrifice day after day because he has restored the people
to intimate relationship with God through the sacrifice of his own self, once
and for all, sealing the relationship permanently. Jesus died that all might live – and live to
the fullest that intimate relationship that is ours through him.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordle.net
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