A Meditation on Christ’s Love
Soon after I became a deacon, at the age of 23, I was sent to a local parish to preach. It was the first time that I would give a homily at a Sunday Mass. As I sat nervously in the kitchen of the Presbytery before Mass, the parish priest said to me: ‘I don’t want you talking about all this love stuff.’ All I remember was thinking, ‘I can’t change what I have prepared to say because that is what the Scripture readings are about this Sunday.’
The parish priest never did explain why he felt it was important to share this advice with me. Perhaps he thought that speaking about love entailed talking about something that is soft, romantic, ineffectual and unreal. He wanted to hear something tough and manly and challenging!
Yet this weekend we hear some of the most important words on love in Jewish scripture — known as the Shema. Listen, Israel: the Lord our God is the one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge on you today be written on your heart.
Observant Jews consider the Shema to be the most important part of the prayer service in Judaism, along with its twice-daily recitation as a mitzvah (religious commandment). It is traditional for Jews to say the Shema as their last words, and for parents to teach their children to say it before they go to sleep at night.
Last week, Pope Francis issued an encyclical letter, entitled Dilexit Nos, on the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus. When asked by a scribe what was the most important commandment, Jesus answered by saying: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart.
In his letter, Pope Francis says that the heart is the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the ‘secrets’ that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance nor illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely ‘who we are’. The letter is a wonderful meditation on the significance of the heart. He writes,
‘Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and to be loved.’
Don’t be put off by the length of this letter. It is a powerful meditation on Christ’s love. Pope Francis ends his letter by saying,
‘In a world where everything is bought and sold, people’s sense of their worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money. We are constantly being pushed to keep buying, consuming and distracting ourselves, held captive to a demeaning system that prevents us from looking beyond our immediate and petty needs. The love of Christ has no place in this perverse mechanism, yet only that love can set us free from a mad pursuit that no longer has room for a gratuitous love. Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost.’
The encyclical can be accessed via https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html
