“Listen, Israel: the Lord our God is the one Lord…” Today’s reading instruct us to let these words be written on our hearts.
This short prayer was part of the daily prayer of Jesus, a faithful Jew, and so it immediately comes to His lips when He is asked which is the first of all commandments of the Law. The genius of Jesus is to link it straight away with the command from Leviticus, “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus understood that to love God with all our heart and soul, mind and strength, it is not sufficiently merely be able to recite the formula from the scriptures, even less to touch or even to wear the box containing the words. Love for God has to be expressed in action towards those among whom we live. As Jesus himself is the living sign of God’s love for us, so we are called to be living signs revealing love for God in the mercy and compassion we have towards our neighbors. The scribe who questioned Jesus comments that this understanding of the Law is far more important than any holocaust or sacrifice. This links nicely with today’s 2nd reading from the letter to the Hebrews, where we are told that one perfect sacrifice of Jesus does what all the sacrifices of the old Law could do; that is to save us from our sins.
The sacrifice of Jesus is made effective for us through our sharing in the life of the Church and through our participation in the sacraments, which are our most precious souvenirs, our way to heaven. The first commandment of the Law is to love God with all our heart and soul, mind and strength, and the second is to share in the life of the Church, especially in the Eucharist.