My dear friends, if you look into the human heart today, you will discover a profound, ache-filled paradox. Everyone in this world is searching for love. We sing about it, we write books about it, we weep over it in dark rooms. And yet, humanity has never been more lonely, more divided, or more heartbroken.
Why? Because modern man has forgotten what love actually is. The world defines love as a feeling, a warm sentiment, a passing emotion that lasts only as long as it is convenient or comfortable.
Look at the Gospel today. A scholar of the Law, a lawyer representing the Pharisees, approaches Our Blessed Lord with a calculated question designed to test Him: "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
The religious leaders had multiplied God's Law into 613 intricate, burdensome rules. They lived in a thicket of legalism! They wanted to see if Jesus would favour one rule over another.
But Our Lord, with divine majesty and piercing clarity, stripped away all their artificial complexities and gave them the absolute essence of human existence:
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
The Divine Geometry of Love
Do you see what Our Lord did? He wedded two loves together so tightly that they can never be divorced! The Vertical Dimension: Love of God. The Horizontal Dimension: Love of Neighbor. Put those two dimensions together, my friends, and what do you get? You get the shape of the Cross!
You cannot have a cross with only a vertical beam pointing to the sky—that is just a pole, cold and isolated. And you cannot have a cross with only a horizontal beam lying on the ground; that is just a log, flat and earthbound.
The person who says, "I love God, but I can't stand my neighbour, my spouse, or my coworker," is trying to stand on a vertical pole! Saint John warns us: He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
The humanitarian who says, "I love humanity, I do good works, but I don't need God or prayer," is trying to lie on a horizontal beam! Human love without God eventually dries up into fatigue, cynicism, and bitterness. True Christian love is the intersection where the Vertical and the Horizontal meet and at that intersection, Love bleeds.
The Practical Cost of Loving
Now let us make this painfully, beautifully practical for our daily lives. What does it mean to love God with ALL your heart, soul, and mind? It means God cannot be a Sunday hobby! He cannot be a spare tire you pull out only when you get a flat tire on the highway of life.
It means giving Him your first thoughts in the morning, your decisions at work, your purity in private, and your trust when tragedy strikes.
And what does it mean to love your neighbour as yourself?
It is very easy to love "humanity" in the abstract. It costs nothing to love people on the other side of the planet whom you will never meet.
But Christ does not ask you to love "humanity." He asks you to love your neighbour, the specific, difficult, irritating human being sitting next to you at the dinner table, living next door, or working in the office across the hall!
A Touch for the Wounded Heart
Perhaps you are here today carrying a heavy, silent wound. Perhaps someone close to you has betrayed your trust. Perhaps you feel unloved, unappreciated, or abandoned in your own home. Perhaps you find it almost impossible to forgive a specific person who hurt you deeply.
My dear soul, look at the Crucifix!
When Jesus hung upon the wood of the Cross, His vertical love for the Father held Him there in perfect obedience. His horizontal arms were stretched wide open to embrace the very men who drove nails into His hands and pierced His side! His blood dripped onto the earth while He prayed: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Real love is not a warm feeling in the stomach. Real love is a choice to sacrifice. Real love is willing the good of the other, even when it costs you tears, pride, and comfort.
Three Resolutions for This Week
If you want to live this Gospel starting today, make these three practical resolutions:
Reclaim Your Vertical Love (Prayer): Give God the first 15 minutes of your day before you touch your smartphone. Look up at Heaven before you look at the world.
Heal a Horizontal Relationship (Forgiveness): Who is the one person you harbor resentment against? Pray for them by name today. Forgiveness does not mean justifying what they did; it means releasing the poison of hatred from your own soul.
Be the Hands of Christ (Sacrifice): Perform one hidden act of kindness this week for someone who can give you nothing in return, a lonely elder, a struggling friend, or someone who irritates you.
Finally, my dear brothers and sisters, at the dusk of our lives, when the shadows fall and the curtain of time closes, we will not be judged by our earthly wealth, our titles, or our achievements. Saint John of the Cross said it best: "In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone."
May Our Blessed Lord grant you the grace today to love Him with your whole heart, and to stretch out your arms to love your neighbour, so that when you stand before Him, He may recognize in you the unmistakable shape of His own Sacred Heart.
Fr. Emmanuel Prays for you