One of the most over-used, misused, and poorly-understood words in the English language is the word, "love." First of all, it is a tricky word. It is both a noun (a person, place or thing) and a verb (an action word), depending on context. The context in which the word "love" is used often isn't clear. When someone says" I love you", is that person using the word as a noun, to decribe an emotion, or as a verb, to state how he or she acts? Or is it both?
In addition, even if the sense in which the word is being used is clear, there are numerous meaning that can be assigned to the word "love" in both its noun and its verb usage. C.S. Lewis wrote a book called "The Four Loves" to explain how the word has very different meanings in different situations. Used as an emotion-- a noun-- the word "love" connotes very different things when we're talking about what we feel for our dog, compared to what we feel towards our spouse, Lewis points out.
All this is worth thinking about in the context of today's Gospel reading (Mt 22: 34-40) in which Jesus is asked which commandment in the law is the greatest, and responds by naming the two greatest commandment: love the Lord with your whole heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
So there is that word, "love," in all its glorious ambiguity.
For the longest time I thought Jesus was using the word "love" as a noun-- that He was articulating a requirement about our emotions. We're supposed to feel "love" towards our neighbor, I thought, which is sometimes difficult, depending on the "neighbor."
But harder still is the idea of having an emotional reaction to God, a being who is so far beyond us that, at least for me, it is tough to have an emotional connection.
Pile on to those difficulties the fact that emotions are fickle, flighty things over which we have little control and that can be influenced by all kinds of extraneous influences. I'm in a better mood when the Twins won their ball game the prior evening than I am when they have lost, for example.
So thinking about these two commandments as requirements for my emotional make-up always seemed dicey.
But, as I ultimately realized, neither Jesus not the Jewish law that He is summarizing intends to be dictating how we will feel, either about God or about our neighbor. The word "love" is being used as a verb. We are being commanded to act in a certain way, not to feel a certain way.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Prentice Hall, 1990) in its note on the word "love" in verse 37 says: "The word 'love' is not primarily a feeling but covenant fidelity, a matter of willing and doing."
"Willing and doing" is something over which I have some control. I can act in love towards God and neighbor. Thomas Acqinas tells us that loving in this sense means wanting what is best for the other and acting to accomplish that.
So when it comes to our "neighbor," that means acting in such a way as to produce the best possible outcome for that person, what is best for them. For example, and with that in mind we might ask outselves what is best for those refugees from Central America who are knocking on our southern border doors-- not what is best for us, but what is best for them.
When it comes to willing what is best for God-- loving God in that sense-- I suppose we come down to those examples Jesus gave us. Jesus is pretty clear how we are to do what is best for Him-- whatever we do for the least among us we do for Him, He tells us at the end of Chapter 25 of Matthew's Gospel. He gives us the examples of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, healing the sick, giving drink to the thirty, and welcoming the stranger. They are six of the seven corporal works of mercy the Church has traditionally taught (the seventh is bury the dead).
You don't have to feel any particular emotion when you do these things (although you will). But you have to do them, at least if you want to follow Jesus. That's what "love" is all about.