Readings: Hosea 14:2-10; Psalm 80; Mark 12:28-34
Jesus’ summary of the law which we find in today’s Gospel clearly meets with the approval of the scribe who asks for it, and indeed the second part of it – love your neighbour as yourself – is sometimes identified as the so-called “Golden Rule” of a global ethic with which all humanity can identify without reference to religious beliefs. Yet this is not what Our Lord puts first: as in the Ten Commandments, it is our love of God which must come first, and from this flows our duty to love our neighbour. Why this way round? As we read in the first Epistle of St John (1 Jn 4:19), ‘we love, because he first loved us.’ It is in response to God’s love that we are called to love him above all, and then our neighbour as his creation. But this is not all: we humans, in our fallen state, cannot achieve on our own the fulfilment of the “Golden Rule” – it is only, as the prophet Hosea reminds us in the first reading, by returning to the Lord and asking him to ‘forgive all iniquity’ (Hos 14:3) that we can hope to achieve the fullness of happiness which is the fulfilment of our human nature.
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