(Matthew 22:37-40)

37Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.".

In the passage for this week Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and then to love your neighbour as yourself.

There are essentially only two different types of story that are told and then retold in different forms. There are stories of love and beauty and there are stories of right and wrong. James Bond, Crime thrillers and war stories deal with right and wrong. Chick flicks, romantic films and comedy deal with love and beauty.

Stories are generally underpinned by a way of looking at the world – Mills and Boon (for example) promote a mystical, romantic ideal of people risking everything for love; Westerns promote rugged male individualism; Hollywood thrillers idealise the American way of life with some heroic figure (the enemies are inevitably foreign) defending civilisations.

In the Christian narrative both types of story are combined. Jesus’ death was an act of love and his resurrection was a triumph for what is right. We can say Jesus died to show his love for us (Eph 5:2) but he also came to fulfil the law and the prophets. He said that until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law, until all is accomplished," (Matthew 5:17-18). Not only do all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments, but ‘if you love your neighbour’, says Paul in Romans, you observe the last six of the Ten Commandments":

The commandments 'Do not commit adultery; do not commit murder; do not steal; do not desire what belongs to someone else' - all these, and any other besides, are summed up in the one command, 'Love your neighbour as you love yourself'. If you love someone you will never do him wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law" (Romans 13:8-12).

A Christianity that concentrates too hard on ‘right and wrong’ ends up legalistic. A Christianity that concentrates to hard on ‘love and beauty’ ends up sentimental. There is too much legalism when people stop me in the street to apologise for not going to church (although this is not made easier by the need to satisfy school requirements). There is too much sentimentality when people say to me that they don’t feel any need to go to church because God is in their hearts. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Christ died to set us free. He did not die to put us in touch with our feelings.

St Bernard of Clairvaux describes loving God as a step by step by process. There are four steps of love:

• We love ourselves for ourselves.
• We love God for what he gives us
• We will come to love God for himself
• We love ourselves for God’s sake