The new commandment of love

During his earthly ministry, Jesus was against the Jewish legal ways. The Rabbis had established a long list of laws that the whole community was supposed to follow. The list was so long and the importance of the laws was exaggerated. Consequently, Jesus considered them as “burdens that are unendurable” (Luke 11, 46), and as the “heavy yokes that oppress and weary the people” (Matthew 11, 28). In fact, some Jews felt that these laws were very oppressive and too many to keep. Though most Jews wanted to be law abiding and that is why they wanted to know at least the most important of these laws. There is a common story which shows how sharp was the Jews’ desire to know where their priorities should be put in terms of keeping the commandments. According to the story, a few years before Christ, a pagan went to Rabbi Hillel with the following challenge: “I will convert if you can teach me the whole law while I stand on one foot.” He wanted to know if there was a simple way of learning a summary of the laws. Hillel replied: “Don’t do to your neighbour what you would not want done to yourself! This is the whole law, all the rest is just comment.” Jesus was asked the same question very often. In most cases it was asked by people sent by the Pharisees and the scribes, with the intention of inducing him to commit himself on a much-debated topic, thus making it possible for the crowd to be divided about him. Jesus knew the trap and he referred them to the ethic of reciprocity: “Always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the meaning of the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7, 12). While Rabbi Hillel used the negative form, Jesus used the positive form of the law. That was an important and significant innovation because it stressed the ‘soul’ of all the commandments: the love of God and the love of the neighbour. In fact, Jesus does not opt for one of the many commandments as the greatest law in order to tell the people what they wanted to hear. Instead he makes the love of God and neighbour a commandment; and the greatest of all. He does this by quoting the book of Deuteronomy: “You shall love Yahweh your God with all your love, with all your soul, with all your strength” (6, 5). In order to make this commandment more concrete and practical, Jesus quotes Levi: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19, 18). In his farewell discourse, Jesus made his position very clear as far as the commandments are concerned: “I give you a new commandment: Love one another just as I have loved you.” (John 13,34). This cleared the confusion around the greatest commandment for those who genuinely wanted to learn. But among those who were listening to Jesus, some were surprised to hear the ‘new’ commandment because it already existed in the book of Leviticus: “Do not take vengeance; love your neighbour as yourself”. In fact the difficulty to grasp the newness of this commandment was precisely in the way Jesus used the word ‘love’ as well as the concepts of ‘love of God’ and ‘love of neighbour’. Jesus used the word love with a new significance, since he meant it in the light of the Saviour’s love: “as I have loved you”. This kind of love was not a sentiment. It was Christ’s self giving love. That is why in order to understand what Jesus meant we must dispossess our minds of all preconceived notions of love, remove all low associations, partial or conventional love. All these aspects of love fall short of what Jesus meant by the word love. Contact: casimir1958@yahoo.com