LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF NEIGHBOUR

After Our Lord had confounded the Pharisees as we heard last week, their great opponents the Sadducees decided that they also would like to try Our Lord’s intelligence themselves. So they asked Him: “what is the greatest commandment?”

     Our Lord’s reply was to quote the familiar First Commandment but, without waiting for an answer He immediately added: “the Second is like it: You must love your neighbour as yourself”. Why did He do this? It was in order to emphasise to them that “the whole of the Law and the Prophets depend upon these two commands.”

     When He refers to “the Law”, Our Lord does not mean a legal system, as we would mean. He is referring here rather to the “Books of the Law,” which are the first five Books of the Old Testament, also often referred to as the “Pentateuch” or Books of Moses, to whose authorship they were ascribed. Hence, when Our Lord was transfigured on Mount Tabor, Moses appeared with Him in order to demonstrate that Our Lord is the fulfilment of the Law.

     The reference to the Prophets is more straightforward, since the Books of the Prophets constitute an immediately recognizable later section of the Old Testament. The prophets’ role throughout the history of the Jewish people was to recall them to repentance from sin, and thereby to restore their proper relationship with Almighty God, their Father. Hence, too, the presence at Our Lord’s Transfiguration of the greatest of all the prophets, Elijah, along with Moses.

     Our Lord is the fulfilment of the entire teaching of the Old Testament, beginning with the Five Books of Moses in which the Chosen People receive God’s Law, and of the Prophets through whom the Holy Spirit spoke to the Jews.     

                                                                             ~ Fr. Paul Dobson