Love Is Not a Permission Slip

 

The Scribe's Question

A scribe asks Jesus which commandment is first of all. The question is not hostile; Mark tells us the man had listened well and asked in good faith. Jesus answers with two Old Testament texts woven into one (Deut. 6:4-5 and Lev. 19:18):

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:29-31)

Jesus does not present two competing or independent commandments. The second arises from the first and cannot be understood apart from it.

Matthew's version draws out the relation even more clearly. The second commandment, Jesus says, is like the first, and all the Law and the Prophets hang on the two together. That is not the language of two adjacent rules. It is the language of a source and what flows from it.

Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matt. 22:37-40).

The first commandment is total. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The word "all" carries the weight of the sentence. It is not one claim among several competing claims on a person's life; it is the claim that orders every other claim. A man who loved God only a little would have a great deal of room left over for other things. A man who loves God with everything has, oddly, more room for his neighbour, not less. The second commandment shares in that totality. It does not stand beside the first as a rival. It follows from it as a conclusion follows from its premise.

Ask the apostle Peter, a few chapters later, whether love that resists what God has revealed is still love. He would have said yes, right up until the moment he found out otherwise.

What Love Is

Before the order can matter, the word itself needs sense.

Love of God is not primarily a feeling. It is the will's total orientation toward God as the highest good, loved for His own sake rather than for what He gives. "With all your heart, soul, mind, and strength" describes the totality of this kind of willing, not the intensity of feeling.

Love of self is willing one's own true good, meaning one's good as God defines it, not as immediate preference defines it. Self-love can be disordered precisely because it can attach to a false good, mistaken for the true one.

Love of neighbour is willing the neighbour's true good, once again as God wills it. "As yourself" means with the same seriousness with which a person rightly wills his own good, not the same content, since a person's good and his neighbour's good may differ.

The three loves are not, then, one act repeated three times with a different object slotted in. God is loved for His own sake, since He is the good itself and needs nothing from us. Self and neighbour are loved for their true good, a good given by God and measured by Him. The order Jesus gives follows from this difference. Love of God comes first because it is love of the source. Love of self and neighbour follow because they are love of what the source has made good, and both stand or fall by the same standard.

Love of Neighbour

Love of neighbour then is love of God turned outward, given a face in someone else's life. This does not mean the neighbour matters only as an occasion for piety. Aquinas's own way of putting it is that the neighbour is loved in God, because the neighbour's goodness is itself a participation in the goodness that comes from God.

This does not mean every act of neighbour-love is consciously aimed at God. It means that neighbour-love reaches its full meaning only when the neighbour's good is understood as God understands it, within the order God's love establishes.

The Beatles had it half right. Love may indeed be all you need, but that only holds if the sentence has an object, and the object is not left for anyone to decide. A sentence with no object is not deep. It is just unfinished.

If it were otherwise, the two commandments would be what they are often mistaken for: a pair negotiable against each other, the sort of arrangement a discernment committee might produce, one that would satisfy everybody and settle nothing. Jesus gives the order instead. God first, with everything a person has, and neighbour second, as what follows and what hangs on it.

A love of neighbour that has slipped loose from love of God has become something else, sentiment, perhaps, or natural compassion, but not yet the commandment Christ describes. Natural compassion is not worthless or false. It is a genuine human good, a sign of the moral law written on the heart, and a person who does not know God can still participate genuinely in the good of love through that natural gift. Christian charity does not compete with this love. It takes hold of it and orders it toward the neighbour's ultimate good, the good that compassion alone cannot see all the way to. Compassion is the candle. Charity is not a different light. It is the candle held up to see by. Paul says something close to this when he insists that every gift, however real, comes to nothing without love (1 Cor. 13:1-3).

Nor is a believer left to work out, privately, what God's love requires in a given case. Love of God does not ask the individual to invent the good anew, however confident the individual, or however recent the invention. Christians receive God's understanding of the good through the revelation He has given, and the Church is entrusted to teach it. Without that anchor, "Love means what God says" collapses into "God says what I think he says," and the whole structure Jesus has given the scribe unravels from inside.

The Church's Understanding

Thomas Aquinas asked the same question in scholastic form: does charity love all things equally, or does love have its own order? His answer begins with a simple point. God is the source of every good, and charity loves creatures because they share in that good.

Proper self-love, on this account, is not a rival to love of God; a person loves himself because he too is one of the creatures whose good comes from God, and that is why "love your neighbour as yourself" works as a measure. Nobody has to be taught to desire his own good; that desire is built into human nature, even when it becomes disordered. What he has to develop is a desire for another's good with the same unforced seriousness, not as a distant duty but as a good pursued from the inside. "As yourself" is not a ceiling on how much to love a neighbour. It names the only standard of seriousness a person already possesses and trusts.

Benedict XVI states the same order in his own idiom: love of God and love of neighbour form a single, inseparable pattern of love rather than two independent moral principles. This order cuts both ways. It rules out claiming closeness to God while ignoring the neighbour in front of you, and it rules out mistaking affection for love, since love is not measured only by what feels compassionate in the moment.

The apostle John states the same order from the other direction, in wording that sounds at first like a challenge to it:

"Whoever does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20).

Read carelessly, this looks like neighbour-love promoted to first place, the very reversal Jesus's answer to the scribe rules out. It is nothing of the kind. John is not declaring the second commandment more fundamental than the first; he is describing what love of God produces when it is real, and what its absence reveals when it is not. A claim to love God that produces no love of neighbour has not achieved a purer devotion. It has revealed that what it calls love of God is not yet the love John is describing. It is correct in form, loveless in fact, and therefore not the first commandment either, whatever it calls itself.

What Love Aims At

With that order in place, a real distinction opens up between two questions. The first asks whether something feels loving. Does it come from genuine affection, avoid causing pain, and affirm the other person as they currently understand themselves? The second asks whether it truly serves that person's good, as God has revealed it. Scripture does not treat those questions as interchangeable. An action may arise from sincere compassion and still fail to lead another toward the good God intends. Truth, then, is not a restraint placed on love from outside; it is the shape love takes when it seeks the beloved's true good rather than simply his comfort.

Peter offers the clearest example. His love for Jesus is not in question. Yet when Jesus reveals that the Messiah must suffer, Peter tries to prevent it (Matt. 16:22). His words come from genuine devotion, not malice, though devotion itself must still be purified, and Jesus does not thank him for it. "Get behind me, Satan," he says (Matt. 16:23). Nobody reading that exchange would call it emotionally warm, and no reader of the Gospel takes it as anything other than an act of love. It is love aimed at Peter's good rather than at Peter's comfort in the moment. Hebrews teaches the same thing. "The Lord disciplines those whom he loves" (Heb. 12:6). Comfort and love are not synonyms in Scripture, whatever the Beatles were humming when they wrote otherwise.

God's commandments give love its concrete form; they do not replace it, and love does not replace them. Understood this way, patience with someone who has not yet arrived at what love asks is not a departure from the commandment; it is the commandment practised across time, with someone who needs it practised slowly. Peter needed that patience too. He got it, across a courtyard fire, three denials, and a beach breakfast, before he was ever fit to feed anyone's sheep (John 18:18, 25; John 18:15-27; John 21:9-14; John 21:15-17). What is excluded is not patience. What is excluded is pretending the destination has moved because patience is more comfortable than honesty.

The Shape of Christian Love

This is why the scribe's question was the right one, and why Jesus's answer was a revelation of love's proper shape. What matters is not which commandment carries more weight, but which comes first in the sequence that makes sense of both. Love of God, with everything a person has, comes first, and neighbour-love follows because it hangs on that love and finds its shape there.

Whenever our sense of "love" is invoked against God's revealed will, the order Jesus established has been inverted. The concern shifts from what love of God asks to what a present feeling of kindness permits. Once that reversal occurs, love stops illuminating the commandments and starts replacing them.

Love is not a permission slip that lets us baptise our preferences with a Christian gloss. It is the form of life into which Christ calls us. It means loving God with everything we are, and our neighbour as ourselves, according to the wisdom of the God who alone knows a neighbour's true good, however uncomfortable or unobvious that good may be. This is not a smaller love than the one the world seeks. It is the same love, ordered by the God who is loved with all the heart, finally strong enough to be trusted, and finally wise enough to be kept. All you need, it turns out, was never in question. Who you needed to love first, always was.

References

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 25–26, "On the Object of Charity" and "On the Order of Charity" (esp. q. 26, a. 4, on loving oneself and one's neighbour). https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3026.htm

Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (25 December 2005), §§16, 18. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html