The Greatest Commandment

When one of the teacher of religious law asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, he replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. The second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:30-31). This is the God I worship. Again, so starkly different from what I read in the Old Testament. Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbor; that is what is most important. He doesn't qualify who our neighbor is. I assume he's exactly that, our neighbor, the person on the street whom we may not know, or maybe only know by acquaintance. I'd say it's selfless, but it's more than that, because we're to love them as ourselves, so it's not exactly selfless. It puts us all on the same level, all deserving of the same treatment, care, and love. That's how I want to love people.

As for the first half of those verses- the part about loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength- that's a big charge. What does that look like? Mother Theresa? The pios hermit hidden in the mountains? To love God with all our heart... my heart so often feels divided between many different loves, how can those loves be reconciled with a heart completely devoted to God? To love God with all my soul... how is this different from the heart? To love God with all my mind... how, when I don't even understand who God is? To love God with all my strength... in order to love God with all those other things, I think it'll take all my strength. Maybe this is just a rhetorical device used by Jesus- the message is clear: we are to love God with everything in our being.